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Lemon Sauce
2 tablespoons butter 1½ tablespoons lemon juice Few gratings nutmeg Pinch of salt Mix the sugar and corn starch. Add the water gradually, stirring constantly. Boil 5 minutes, remove from fire, add the butter, lemon juice and nutmeg. Serve hot. :
A cornstarch-thickened dessert sauce of the plainest kind, and the sort of thing that was expected with any steamed or baked pudding. Note that the ingredient list as printed here is incomplete.
- The missing quantitiesThe instructions call for sugar, corn starch and water, but the list gives amounts only for the butter and lemon juice. The book's own proportions for this sauce are not recoverable from this page; comparable sauces of the period run about 1 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon corn starch and 1 cup boiling water, but treat that as a reconstruction rather than the original.
- Mix dry before wetSugar and cornstarch must be combined dry, then the water added gradually with constant stirring. Cornstarch dumped into hot liquid seizes into lumps that will not disperse afterward.
- Boil 5 minutes, but gentlyCornstarch reaches full thickness within a minute or two of boiling; the remaining time is there to cook out the raw starch taste. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir, or the bottom scorches and the sauce thins from over-agitation.
- Butter and juice go in off the heatThis is the hinge. Butter whisked in away from the fire gives gloss and body; boiled in, it separates. Lemon juice added off the heat keeps its brightness, since prolonged boiling flattens the flavor and can slacken the starch.
- Fresh lemon onlyA tablespoon and a half is a small amount carrying the whole sauce, so bottled juice shows badly here. One medium lemon yields two to three tablespoons.
- Nutmeg"Few gratings" means grated from the whole nut at the moment of use, perhaps an eighth of a teaspoon. Pre-ground nutmeg is duller and needs a little more.
- Yield and servingNo yield can be worked out from this page, since the sugar, corn starch and water amounts are missing; on the reconstructed proportions above it would come to roughly a cup, enough for four to six servings ladled hot over cottage pudding, gingerbread, steamed suet or fruit pudding, or plain cake. It thickens further as it cools; thin with a spoonful of hot water if it stands.
Lemon sauce belongs to a family of cornstarch-thickened dessert sauces that appear widely in American pudding chapters from roughly the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth, alongside hard sauce, foamy sauce and vanilla sauce. Cornstarch, cheap and shelf-stable, let a cook produce a clear, glossy sauce with no eggs and no cream, which mattered in a period when a plain steamed or baked pudding was a common dessert and the sauce did most of the work of making it interesting. The Metropolitan Cook Book was one of the free booklets distributed to policyholders by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, part of a wider corporate push into domestic advice and nutrition education; its recipes lean deliberately toward economy, short ingredient lists and dishes a household could put together from the pantry, which is exactly what this sauce is.