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Sauce for Plum Pudding
Put one large tablespoonful of butter into a stewpan, when it has melted stir in two tablespoonfuls of flour, and mix well; then pour in gradually one and one-half breakfast cupfuls of hot water, and stir over the fire until cooked; then add one-half pound of brown sugar, two teaspoonfuls of lemon juice, and a small quantity of grated nutmeg. When the sugar has dissolved, serve the sauce.
A flour-thickened sweet sauce of the plainest kind — a white roux let down with water rather than milk, then sweetened. It comes together in under ten minutes and needs only attention to two things: cooking the flour and not scorching the sugar.
- The hinge: cook the rouxGive the butter and flour a full minute or two of stirring over moderate heat before any water goes in, and let the finished sauce bubble gently a few minutes after it thickens. Undercooked flour is the commonest way this sauce goes wrong, and it tastes pasty.
- Breakfast cupfulsA breakfast cup is the large cup of a Victorian tea service, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so one and a half of them is somewhere between 1 1/2 and just under 2 cups. Start at 1 1/2 cups and thin with more hot water at the end if the sauce is stiffer than heavy cream.
- Half a pound of brown sugarThat is roughly a generous cup, packed. It is a lot of sugar for the liquid, which is the point — plum pudding sauce is meant to be frankly syrupy — but it will taste less cloying if you use dark brown sugar for the molasses edge.
- Add the sugar off the boilOnce the sugar is in, keep the pan at a bare simmer and stir until it dissolves. A hard boil at that sugar concentration catches and turns bitter on the bottom of the pan.
- StewpanAny heavy-bottomed saucepan of 1 1/2 to 2 quarts. Thin pans scorch the sugar.
- Nutmeg and lemonGrate the nutmeg fresh and add the lemon juice at the very end, off the heat, so its brightness survives. Pre-ground nutmeg will read as dusty against so much sugar.
- Yield and servingAbout two cups, enough for eight to ten servings of pudding. Serve it hot in a warmed jug or sauceboat; it thickens noticeably as it cools and will need a splash of hot water and a whisk if it stands.
Plum pudding traditionally arrives with one of three things: hard sauce (butter creamed with sugar and brandy), a boozy custard, or exactly this — a hot, thin, sweet sauce built on a roux. The last is the frugal and the temperate option, since it uses water and no spirits at all. Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially a working file of what is often said to be several thousand such formulas, terse and unsentimental, recorded in the household measures of the day rather than in restaurant weights. Sauces of this family — flour, water, sugar, a spice, an acid — were once so standard in English and American kitchens that cookbooks printed a number of variations, swapping in vinegar, sherry, or fruit juice for the lemon; they have largely fallen out of use as cornstarch and then simple fruit coulis took over the job.