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Lemon Sauce for Puddings
Boil one pint of water and one breakfast cupful of sugar for five minutes, then stir in three large teaspoonfuls of corn starch previously mixed with a little cold water, stir over the fire for ten minutes, then add the grated rind and juice of one lemon and one tablespoonful of butter. When the butter is melted the sauce is ready to be served
A cornstarch-thickened dessert sauce of the sort served over steamed and boiled puddings. The one thing that matters is adding the lemon juice at the end, off or nearly off the heat.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups; a breakfast cupful is roughly a standard 8-ounce cup, so the syrup is about 2 cups water to 1 cup sugar. Three large teaspoonfuls of cornstarch is close to a level tablespoon plus a little, which gives a pourable sauce rather than a set one.
- Acid lastProlonged boiling after the lemon juice goes in can break down the cornstarch and thin the sauce, which is why the juice comes at the end. Note that the recipe itself does not say to remove the pan from the fire; it adds rind, juice and butter last and calls the sauce done once the butter has melted.
- Slurry techniqueMix the cornstarch with two or three tablespoons of cold water until smooth before it goes in, and pour it into the boiling syrup in a stream while stirring. Dry starch dropped into hot liquid will lump instantly.
- Ten minutes is longCornstarch reaches full thickness within a minute or two of coming back to a simmer. Ten minutes of stirring over direct heat risks scorching the sugar at the pan bottom; use moderate heat and stop once the sauce turns from cloudy to glossy.
- ZestGrate only the yellow outer layer. White pith carried in with the rind will make the sauce bitter, and the finished sauce is not strained.
- ButterCold butter stirred in off the heat gives the best gloss and body. A tablespoon is modest; two will make a richer sauce without loosening it.
- Yield and servingRoughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups depending on how hard it boils, enough for a family-sized pudding. Serve warm, poured over the pudding at table; it thickens as it cools and will need thinning with a spoonful of hot water if reheated.
Lemon sauce is the standard companion to the boiled and steamed puddings that dominated American dessert courses through the nineteenth century — cottage pudding, suet pudding, Indian pudding, gingerbread — and many general cookbooks of the period carry a version. Older forms were thickened with flour or with egg, giving a heavier or more custard-like result; cornstarch, commercially available in the United States from the middle of the century, produced the clear, glossy, faintly translucent sauce seen here. Oscar Tschirky was maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf, later the Waldorf-Astoria, from 1893, and his 1896 book records the working repertoire of a large commercial kitchen, in which the instructions read as a plain sequence with no fuss about quantities beyond a cupful and a pint.