Vinegar Sauce
One and a half cups sugar, one and a half table-spoons flour in a little water, two table-spoons vinegar, quarter of a grated nutmeg, and a pinch of salt; pour over this one and a half pints boiling water, and boil ten minutes; just before taking from stove add one dessert-spoon of butter. - Mrs. G. W. Collins, Urbana.
A thin, sweet-sour pudding sauce of the kind ladled hot over steamed or boiled puddings. It reads oddly to modern eyes because the vinegar is doing the job lemon juice would do now.
- The measuresOne and a half pints is 3 cups. A dessert-spoon is 2 teaspoons, so the butter is a modest finishing knob rather than a rich enrichment.
- NutmegA quarter of a whole grated nutmeg is roughly half a teaspoon of freshly grated. Pre-ground nutmeg is milder and flatter; use a whole one if you have it, and grate it at the last moment.
- VinegarCider vinegar is the likely original and gives the best result. Plain distilled white vinegar is harsher; balsamic or wine vinegars will pull the sauce off course entirely.
- The hinge: slurry the flourThe instruction to mix the flour "in a little water" is the whole technique. Whisk it into a smooth paste with the sugar and cold water before the boiling water goes in, or the sauce will be lumpy and no amount of boiling will fix it.
- ConsistencyA tablespoon and a half of flour to 3 cups of liquid gives a barely thickened, syrupy sauce, not a gravy. That is intentional. If you want it to coat a spoon, double the flour.
- The ten minutesKeep the full boil. Flour-thickened sauces taste raw and pasty if pulled early, and this one has little fat or dairy to mask it. Stir often; the sugar concentration makes it catch on the bottom.
- Butter lastAdding the butter off the heat, or just before, keeps it from separating out into a slick. Whisk it in and serve at once.
- Yield and servingSomewhat under 3 cups after the ten-minute boil. Serve hot over steamed suet or cottage pudding, gingerbread, or plain baked apple dumplings.
Vinegar sauce belongs to a large family of nineteenth-century American pudding sauces built on sugar, water, a little flour and an acid. Lemons were expensive and seasonal in inland households, while cider vinegar was a common pantry staple, and that may account for the substitution. The vinegar supplies the sharpness that keeps a cup and a half of sugar from being cloying; the nutmeg does the aromatic work that lemon zest would otherwise do. Sauces of this kind were a common accompaniment to steamed and boiled puddings. The attribution to Mrs. G. W. Collins of Urbana is typical of the compiled community cookbooks of the period, which were assembled from contributed household recipes and printed the contributor's name and town beside each one.