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Brandy Sauce
1/2 cup butter. 1 cup confectioners' sugar.
Whites 2 eggs beaten stiff. 1/8 teaspoon salt. 2/3 cup heavy cream whipped stiff. 2 tablespoons brandy. 1 tablespoon Jamaica rum.
Grating nutmeg.
PROCESS: Cream butter, add sugar gradually, stirring constantly. Place over hot water, add eggs and beat with a Gem whip until evenly blended, cool slightly and add brandy, rum and salt. Fold in cream and sprinkle with nutmeg.
Fifth Sunday
A hard-sauce variant for plum pudding, built as an egg-white and cream foam rather than a cooked custard. The ingredient list and the method do not match, and the egg handling is the reason this one cannot be recommended.
- Raw egg whitesUndercooked egg whites -- The whites are beaten stiff, then beaten into the sugar-and-butter base over hot water, cooled slightly and finished with cream. Nothing here is held at a measured temperature for a measured time, so the whites cannot be assumed cooked. Uncooked egg in a sauce like this is a recognised Salmonella risk, and brief warming over a water bath is no assurance against it. Use a current recipe if you want a brandy sauce.
- The brandy is not a safeguardTwo tablespoons of brandy and one of rum in a sauce of this size is nowhere near enough alcohol to make uncooked egg safe, and a foam of this kind would presumably be held at room temperature until served, which does the risk no favours.
- The butter is missingThe process opens with "cream butter" but no butter appears in the ingredient list. Hard sauces of the period commonly run in the region of half a cup of butter to a cup of confectioners' sugar, but the original as printed is incomplete and there is no way to recover the intended figure with confidence.
- Gem whipApparently a proprietary beater or whisk of the period rather than a special technique. An ordinary whisk does the same job.
- Confectioners' sugarFinely powdered sugar, often cut with a little starch. It dissolves without grit, which suits a sauce that is barely heated.
- Jamaica rumA dark, heavy pot-still rum, considerably more assertive than a light modern blend, and named in period recipes where a plain 'rum' would not do.
- YieldNot given, and it cannot be estimated with confidence while the butter quantity is missing. A foam of this kind will lose volume on standing.
Brandy sauce and its stiffer cousin hard sauce belong to the English plum-pudding tradition that American cookbooks inherited, and the pairing of a spirit with a dense boiled pudding is old enough that such sauces are often simply called "pudding sauce" in nineteenth-century books. The book organises itself as a year of Sunday menus, and this one is filed under "Fifth Sunday"; the page itself gives no month, so nothing here identifies it as a Christmas sauce. The construction, with whipped whites and whipped cream folded into creamed butter and sugar, is a lighter, aerated treatment than the older plain butter-and-sugar paste. It also reflects a period in which uncooked egg in a dessert sauce was unremarkable.