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Vanilla Sauce
1 cup boiling water 4 tablespoonfuls sugar teaspoonful lemonjuice or a bit of lemon-rind A little salt 1 egg yolk 1 tablespoonful cornstarch 1 teaspoonful vanilla 1 teaspoonful butter Mix the corn-starch, sugar, and salt, and pour the boiling water over them. Cook until thickened.
Remove from fire, beat in the egg yolk, butter, and flavoring.
New England Pan Pie ("Pandowdy")
A simple cornstarch-thickened dessert sauce, of the kind kept on hand to pour over bread puddings and baked leftovers. It comes together in about five minutes and needs only attention at the moment the yolk goes in.
- The hinge: adding the yolkThe pan must be off the heat and the starch mixture just below a boil when the yolk goes in, and it should be whisked in fast and in a thin stream. Dump it into a rolling boil and you get threads of cooked egg rather than a smooth sauce.
- Cook the starch out"Cook until thickened" means letting it bubble gently for a minute or two after it has gone glossy, stirring constantly. Cornstarch pulled off the instant it thickens keeps a raw, chalky taste.
- Egg safetyThe residual heat of the sauce will not reliably bring a raw yolk to a safe temperature. If that matters to you, whisk the yolk with a little of the hot sauce, return the whole thing to low heat, and stir until it reaches 160F without letting it boil.
- Lemon juice quantityLemon quantity -- The line reads "teaspoonful lemon juice": only the numeral has dropped out in this printing, as it has elsewhere on the page. A teaspoon of juice, or a strip of rind steeped in the boiling water and lifted out, is what is meant.
- Butter and vanilla go in lastBoth are added off the heat for a reason: the butter emulsifies into the warm starch and gives gloss, and vanilla extract loses much of its aroma if boiled.
- MeasuresA cup here is 8 fl oz. Four tablespoons of sugar is a quarter cup, which makes a moderately sweet sauce; taste before serving.
- Yield and servingRather more than a cup of sauce. Serve warm; it thickens considerably as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water or milk.
Cornstarch sauces like this one belong to the later nineteenth-century American kitchen, where commercial cornstarch was widely available and offered a shortcut to the older stirred custards, which typically called for more eggs and constant attention. The single yolk here gives richness and colour without requiring a double boiler. Bread puddings, brown betties and pandowdies were common uses for stale bread, and such puddings were often served with a sweet pouring sauce. Vanilla was a common flavouring, with lemon offered here as the alternative.