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Lemon Sauce (Two cups sugar two eggs juice)
Two cups sugar, two eggs, juice and rind of two lemons; beat all together, and just before serving add pint boiling water; set on stove, and when at boiling point, serve. Never boil sauce after adding lemon, as it makes it bitter. Some add one-third cup butter and table-spoon corn starch.
A pudding sauce of the old school: sugar, eggs, lemon and boiling water, thickened only by the eggs unless you take the cornstarch option. The hinge is temperature control, since this is an egg custard sauce in all but name.
- Temper, do not dumpBeat the sugar, eggs and lemon together well, then add the boiling water in a thin stream while whisking constantly. Poured in all at once it will scramble the eggs into threads.
- "When at boiling point"Take this loosely. Keep the sauce below a hard boil, whisking, until it thickens enough to coat a spoon; a true rolling boil will curdle it. The book's own warning against boiling after the lemon goes in is about bitterness rather than curdling, but it too keeps you off a hard boil.
- The bitternessThe book blames the lemon, and it is half right. Prolonged heat with acid does dull the flavor, but bitterness in a lemon sauce more often comes from white pith grated in with the rind. Take only the yellow zest.
- A pintTwo cups of boiling water. With two cups of sugar this yields something over three cups of sauce, enough for perhaps 8 to 10 servings of pudding.
- SweetnessTwo cups of sugar to a pint of water is a heavy syrup by current taste. One cup makes a lighter sauce and it will still thicken, though with less sugar the eggs will set at a slightly lower temperature, so watch it more closely.
- The cornstarch variationIf you use the tablespoon of cornstarch, slake it in a little cold water first and add it with the boiling water. Starch wants a brief simmer to thicken fully and lose its raw taste, which sits awkwardly with keeping the eggs below a boil; bring it up gently, only as far as it needs, then pull it off the heat.
- Butter lastWhisk the third cup of butter in off the heat, in pieces, once the sauce has thickened. It gives gloss and body and will not break if the sauce is no longer near boiling.
- ServingMeant to go out hot, over steamed or boiled puddings, cottage pudding, gingerbread or plain cake. It thickens further as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water.
Sweet dessert sauces of this kind were a fixture of nineteenth-century American cookery because the puddings they accompanied were deliberately plain: batter puddings, suet puddings, boiled and steamed cakes. The sauce often carried the flavour, and lemon was a standby. The Dixie Cook Book (1883) prints a run of these sauces one after another, distinguished mainly by the flavouring, and it frequently tacks on "some add" variations of the kind seen here. The instruction never to boil after adding the lemon is the sort of practical kitchen note these books preserve.