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Minnehaha Sauce
Beat, in a two quart bowl, four table-spoons butter and two thirds pint brown sugar, to a cream, with a wooden spoon; then add four table-spoons sweet cream, then the juice and grated rind of a large lemon; place the bowl on top of the tea-kettle half full of boiling water; when melted to a thick creamy froth, serve.
A frothy warm butter-and-sugar sauce for steamed or boiled puddings, built in a bowl set over a kettle. The whole thing depends on gentle heat.
- Never let it boilKeep the heat gentle -- The sauce is a butter, cream and sugar mixture lightened by beating. The original sets the bowl over a kettle of boiling water, but the bowl itself should never get hot enough to boil the sauce or it will separate into greasy syrup; take it off when it has thickened to the creamy froth the recipe describes.
- Two-thirds pint brown sugarMeasured by volume, that is about 1 1/3 cups packed, roughly 9-10 oz. Light brown gives a caramel note; dark brown will dominate the lemon.
- Four table-spoons butterHalf a stick, 2 oz by the modern level measure. Period spoon measures were not standardised, so treat the quantity as approximate.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh, unsoured cream, as distinct from soured cream. Heavy cream is the right substitute.
- The kettle as double boilerA heatproof bowl over a saucepan of barely simmering water does the same job with better control. Choose a bowl that sits above the water rather than in it.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest of the lemon; the white pith turns the sauce bitter. Add the juice and zest after the butter and sugar are creamed, or the acid makes the mixture look curdled from the start.
- Yield and servingRoughly a cup and a half, though frothing makes the volume hard to pin down; serve hot over steamed pudding, baked apples or gingerbread. It stiffens as it cools and can be rewarmed over water.
The name almost certainly alludes to Minnehaha, the figure in Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha (1855), whom the poem renders as "Laughing Water" -- an apt label for a pudding sauce beaten to a froth, and literary names attached to sweet sauces are common in nineteenth-century cookbooks. The recipe belongs to the family of hard and creamed sauces served with boiled and steamed puddings, a class of dessert well suited to kitchens where a pot of water was easier to manage than an oven. Warm frothed sauces like this one sit between hard sauce, which is served cold and firm, and cooked custards and sabayons; the improvised kettle bain-marie shows a cook without a purpose-made double boiler managing delicate heat.