Mom's Carmel Sauce

1 ½ cup brown sugar

2 tbsp. cornstarch

¼ tsp. salt

1 ½ cups water

¼ tsp. nutmeg

¼ tsp. cinnamon

¼ cup butter

¼ cup lemon juice

Mix sugar, cornstarch and salt together.  Add water and stir over medium heat until it boils and thickens.  Add spices and remove from heat.  Add butter and stir until melted.  Add lemon and stir.

Serve With:  Plum pudding or ice cream

This is the sauce that my Mom made every Christmas.  We would pour it over our Christmas pudding and wallow in its sweet, sticky goodness.  If we were really lucky, there would be some left on Boxing Day and we would pour it over ice cream. 

I don't know where Mom got this recipe.  I believe that she made it up herself because she never used a cookbook. When we started asking how to make it, she couldn't tell us.  I had to wait until Christmas one year and stand beside her with a pen and paper. I watched as this sauce was magically made from a memory so entrenched in her that she literally "made it without thinking"... it simply happened.