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Golden Sauce
Break a nutmeg in pieces, put it in a saucepan with a quart of water, and boil. Mix two ounces of corn starch with one pound of sugar, then stir it into the boiling water, and stir over the fire until the corn starch is cooked, then add one-fourth pound of butter. Beat the yolks of three eggs with one tablespoonful of the sauce, then stir them quickly into the remainder, which should be immediately removed as the yolks will curdle if boiled. Strain the sauce, and it is then ready for serving.
A boiled sweet pudding sauce, thickened with cornstarch and enriched with yolks at the last moment. The only difficult part is the finish, and the original tells you why.
- The hinge: the yolksOnce the yolks go in, the pan must be off the heat entirely, not merely lowered. Beat them with a spoonful of the hot sauce first as directed, stir them in, and keep stirring off the burner; the residual heat sets them without scrambling.
- Weights in modern termsTwo ounces of cornstarch is a scant half cup; one pound of sugar is about 2¼ cups; a quarter pound of butter is one stick. The quart of water reduces slightly during the nutmeg boil, which is expected.
- NutmegBreak a whole nutmeg with the flat of a knife or a mallet rather than grating it — the point is a clean infusion that gets strained out. Pre-ground nutmeg will cloud the sauce and cannot be removed; if it is all you have, use about a teaspoon and skip the straining.
- Cooking out the starchAfter the slurry goes in, keep it at a gentle boil for two to three minutes with constant stirring. Cornstarch thickens before it is cooked, and pulling it early leaves a chalky, raw taste that the butter will not mask.
- Mixing the starch and sugarCombining the cornstarch with the dry sugar, as written, is deliberate — the sugar crystals keep the starch grains apart so they do not lump when they hit boiling water. Add the mixture in a steady stream, not all at once.
- StrainingStrain while hot through a fine sieve. It catches the nutmeg pieces and any threads of set yolk, and it is the difference between a glossy sauce and a speckled one.
- Sweetness and consistencyA pound of sugar to a quart of water is very sweet by current taste, calibrated for plain steamed and boiled puddings. Cutting the sugar to 10 or 12 ounces will thin the body slightly; compensate with another half ounce of cornstarch if you want it to coat a spoon.
- Yield and servingMore than a quart; the dissolved sugar and butter add noticeable volume beyond the water. Serve warm over steamed pudding, plain cake or baked apples; it thickens considerably as it cools, and can be loosened again over very low heat, gently, since the yolks in it can still break.
Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's kitchen into print in 1896, was compiling the standard repertoire of a large American hotel, and sweet pudding sauces were part of the daily furniture of that repertoire — a steamed or boiled pudding rarely went to table without one. "Golden sauce" reads as a descriptive name rather than a proper one: the color comes from the egg yolks and butter. The construction here is essentially a thin boiled custard propped up with cornstarch, a substitution that spread in American kitchens after cornstarch became a cheap commercial product from the 1840s and 1850s onward; the starch base is far less fragile than a true custard, though the recipe's own warning shows the finished sauce still cannot be boiled. The nutmeg infusion is older still, in line with the English pudding tradition, where nutmeg, mace and rosewater were common sweet seasonings.