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Every-Day Sauce
To one pint boiling water, add heaping tea-cup sugar, table-spoon butter (see General Directions), pinch of salt, and table-spoon corn starch dissolved in cold water; season with nutmeg or vanilla, boil half an hour, and if good and well cooked it will be very clear. Or, to a table-spoon of currant jelly, add a table-spoon of hot water; beat well and add to the above just before serving, omitting all other flavoring. Or, add a tea-spoon of raspberry syrup.
A basic cornstarch pudding sauce, the sort ladled over steamed puddings, boiled batter puddings and plain cake. The recipe is sound, but one instruction needs rethinking.
- The half-hour boilCornstarch thickens fully within two to three minutes of reaching a boil, and prolonged boiling breaks the starch down again, thinning the sauce and cooking off the flavoring. Simmer only until it turns from cloudy to clear and glossy, then take it off the heat. The book's promise that a well-cooked sauce is "very clear" is the real test, not the clock.
- A tea-cupPeriod tea-cups were not standardised; they are commonly reckoned at roughly three-quarters of a modern cup, so a heaping tea-cup of sugar is probably somewhere around 3/4 to 1 cup. That is a sweet sauce by current taste; two-thirds of it works better with an already-sweet pudding.
- "See General Directions"An in-book cross reference to the volume's general directions on ingredients and measuring, not part of the method for this sauce.
- Dissolving the starchSlake the tablespoon of cornstarch in two or three tablespoons of cold water until smooth before it goes anywhere near the pan. Added dry to boiling water it will seize into lumps that no amount of beating will clear.
- Nutmeg or vanillaGrate nutmeg in at the end rather than boiling it; vanilla extract should go in off the heat, since alcohol-based extract loses most of its aroma in a boiling pan.
- The jelly and syrup variantsBoth are best stirred in at the last moment; the original directs the beaten jelly and hot water to be added "just before serving." Currant jelly loosened with hot water gives a tart red sauce; raspberry syrup gives a sweeter one. Neither wants further cooking, and for the jelly the original tells you to omit all other flavoring.
- YieldAbout a pint of finished sauce, enough for six to eight servings. It thickens noticeably as it cools, so serve it warm or thin it with a spoonful of hot water.
Sweet cornstarch sauces like this belong to the era when a boiled or steamed pudding closed most substantial meals, and general cookbooks commonly carried a page or two of "pudding sauces" to go over them. Cornstarch, commercially manufactured in the United States from the 1840s onward, gave cooks a cheap, neutral thickener that produced a clear glossy sauce where flour gave a cloudy, pasty one — hence the recipe's insistence that a properly cooked sauce is "very clear." The Dixie Cook Book, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox and drawing heavily on her earlier Buckeye Cookery, was assembled largely from contributed household receipts, which may account for the run-on structure here: one base sauce with two alternate flavorings tacked on.