Creamy Sauce
1/4 cup butter. 2/3 cup powdered sugar. 2 tablespoons milk. 2 tablespoons Sherry wine.
Few grains nutmeg.
PROCESS: Cream butter, add sugar gradually, stirring constantly, add milk and wine very slowly, continue beating. Add a sprinkle of nutmeg. To avoid having sauce curdle, milk and wine must be added drop by drop.
This is a hard sauce — a butter-and-sugar cream served cold on hot puddings — with sherry and milk beaten in. It is simple, but it splits easily, and that is the whole difficulty.
- Butter quantityThe instruction to cream butter has no amount attached to it in the ingredient list. Hard sauce recipes commonly run somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 cup butter to 2/3 cup powdered sugar, so use roughly 1/3 cup (about 5 tablespoons) softened unsalted butter and judge by texture.
- Powdered sugarHere this means a finely ground sugar, the nearest modern equivalent being confectioners' sugar (which is usually cut with a little cornstarch). Fine sugar is essential: granulated sugar will not dissolve in cold butter and the sauce stays gritty.
- Drop by drop is not rhetoricThe liquid is a full quarter cup going into a small amount of butter, which is well past what a butter emulsion tolerates comfortably. Add the milk and sherry a few drops at a time, beating until each addition disappears, or the fat will separate into curds.
- TemperatureButter at cool room temperature, around 65F, holds the emulsion; butter that has gone greasy and translucent will not. If it does break, chill the bowl briefly and beat hard to bring it back.
- SherryA medium or cream sherry suits this better than a dry fino. Nothing is cooked off, so the alcohol remains in the finished sauce.
- Yield and servingWith the butter reconstructed as above this makes roughly a cup, enough for about six modest servings. Chill until firm and spoon it onto a hot steamed pudding, baked apples or gingerbread so it melts at the table.
Hard sauce is the English pudding sauce that is generally traced to plum pudding, coming to American tables with it and staying on for every steamed and baked dessert of the nineteenth century; the name is usually said to refer to its firmness when cold, in contrast to the poured liquid sauces. Sherry, brandy and rum versions were all common. Its appearance in a book of Sunday dinners is telling: it keeps for days in a cold pantry, needs no cooking, and turns a plain pudding into something fit for company, which is exactly the sort of economy a weekly menu book was built to teach.