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Wine Sauce
This is made of three measures of sugar, one of butter and one of wine.
A formula rather than a recipe: three parts sugar, one part butter, one part wine, with no method, no quantity and no cooking. It belongs to the family of pudding sauces served with plum pudding, steamed puddings and mince pie, and it can be taken two ways — creamed cold, or melted warm.
- What a "measure" isThe original gives no unit, only a ratio. Any consistent measure works; a practical batch is 3/4 cup sugar, 1/4 cup (4 tbsp) butter and 1/4 cup wine, which serves six to eight alongside a pudding.
- Cold versionCream softened butter with the sugar until pale, then beat in the wine a spoonful at a time so the mixture does not break. This is the hard-sauce treatment; use superfine or sifted powdered sugar, since granulated will stay gritty.
- Warm versionMelt butter and sugar together over low heat, add the wine off the boil and stir until smooth. Do not let it boil hard or the butter separates and the sauce turns oily.
- Which wineSauces of this type were often made with a fortified wine — sherry, madeira or port. A dry table wine gives a thin, sour result at this sugar ratio.
- SaltButter of the period was often salted. With unsalted butter, add a pinch; without it the sauce reads as flatly sweet.
- AlcoholNeither version cooks off much alcohol, and the cold one none at all. Worth knowing if children are at the table.
- ServingSpoon over hot pudding just before it goes out, so the sauce softens against the heat rather than sitting and separating in the boat.
Wine sauce and its close relative hard sauce were the standard accompaniment to boiled and steamed puddings through the nineteenth century, and household books often print them in this kind of shorthand — a ratio, on the assumption that any cook knew what to do with it. The proportions are the same skeleton as brandy butter: fat, sugar and spirit, with the sugar high enough to hold the mixture together. Its brevity here is a fair snapshot of how such books worked, giving full attention to the pudding itself and treating the sauce as common knowledge. Fortified wines were the usual choice.