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Brown Sugar Sauce
5 tablespoons butter. 1 cup soft brown sugar. 1/2 tablespoon vanilla. ⅓ cup thick cream.
PROCESS: Roll sugar, sift and add gradually to cream, stirring constantly. Cream butter and add first mixture slowly, continue stirring. Add vanilla and beat thoroughly with a whip.
An uncooked dessert sauce in the hard-sauce family, richer and looser than most because of the cream. Everything depends on temperature and on getting the sugar smooth.
- Roll and sift the sugarBrown sugar of the period arrived damp and lumpy, and rolling it with a pin then sifting was one standard way to break up the grit. Modern light brown sugar still packs into hard nuggets; press it through a sieve, or the finished sauce will be sandy.
- "Thick cream"This means heavy or double cream, roughly 36 percent fat or higher, not the thin coffee cream also sold at the time. Half-and-half will not carry the butter and the sauce will separate.
- Butter temperatureCream the butter at cool room temperature, around 65F. If it is warm enough to look greasy, the cream will not emulsify into it and you will get a broken, oily sauce.
- Add cold to soft, slowlyThe hinge of the recipe: the sugared cream goes into the creamed butter in a thin stream with constant beating. Dumping it in at once curdles the mixture. If it does break, keep whipping over ice until it comes back.
- VanillaHalf a tablespoon is 1½ teaspoons, a generous but not unreasonable amount for this quantity. Period vanilla extracts varied wildly in strength; taste and adjust.
- "Beat with a whip"A wire whisk. A hand mixer on medium does the same work in a minute or two; a stand mixer with the whisk is faster still but will overinflate the sauce if run long.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; the cream alone is a cup and a half, so expect well over two cups once beaten. Intended cold or barely cool over hot steamed puddings, baked apples or gingerbread, where it half-melts on contact.
- KeepingRefrigerate in a covered jar and use within three or four days. It stiffens when cold; let it stand out twenty minutes and rewhip briefly before serving.
Sauces like this descend from English hard sauce, the creamed butter-and-sugar dressing served with Christmas pudding, which cookbooks of the era are often said to have listed under other names, such as brandy sauce or Sterling sauce, depending on the flavouring. Substituting soft brown sugar for white gives a faint molasses note, and the addition of cream turns the stiff pat into something pourable, a compromise between hard sauce and a custard, with none of a custard's cooking. Elizabeth O. Hiller compiled 52 Sunday Dinners in 1913 as a year of complete menus for the American middle-class household, and an uncooked sauce that could be whipped up while the pudding steamed was exactly the sort of thing such a plan needed. Brown sugar was then sold moist in bulk and simply set hard, which is why the first instruction is to roll it rather than simply measure it.