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Foamy Sauce (Tablespoons sherry wine)
2 tablespoons sherry wine.
Whites 2 eggs.
Nutmeg. 1/2 cup butter. 1 cup powdered sugar.
Yolk 1 egg.
PROCESS: Cream butter; add sugar gradually, stirring constantly, yolk of egg and sherry; continue stirring. Cook over hot water until mixture thinly coats wooden spoon. Remove from range and pour over stiffly beaten whites of eggs. Turn in serving pitcher and sprinkle with nutmeg.
A pudding sauce built like a warm sabayon: a cooked butter-sugar-yolk base lightened with beaten whites. It is served in a pitcher, poured over steamed or baked puddings.
- The hinge: gentle heatCook the base in a bowl over barely simmering water, stirring without pause, and pull it off the moment it films the back of a wooden spoon. If the water boils or the bowl touches it, the yolk scrambles and the butter breaks into grease.
- "Powdered sugar"In American books of this period the term more often meant a finely ground granulated sugar than the modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Either will work here; the finer the grind, the less grittiness.
- Butter measure1/2 cup is 4 oz, one standard stick. Use unsalted and have it genuinely soft so it creams smoothly with the sugar rather than seizing when heated.
- Raw whitesThe stiffly beaten whites are folded into hot base but never actually cooked. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized whites or reconstituted dried albumen.
- "Remove from range"The range is the stove, not an oven. Nothing here goes into an oven at any point.
- The sherryUse a medium or cream sherry, an oloroso or an amontillado; dry fino tastes thin against this much sugar. Cooking sherry is salted and will ruin it.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the filled pitcher. Pre-ground nutmeg loses its edge, and it is the only spice in the sauce.
- Yield and timingEnough for six to eight servings of pudding. Make it immediately before serving: it is called foamy because of the whites, and it will slump and begin to weep as it stands.
Foamy sauce belongs to the family of nineteenth-century pudding sauces that also includes hard sauce and the various "wine sauces" - sweetened butter enriched with egg and spirit, meant to be spooned or poured over a steamed suet or fruit pudding. Its method is close to that of Italian zabaglione or French sabayon, a yolk foam warmed over water, but this version leans on creamed butter and sugar rather than yolks alone, which makes it richer and gives it enough body to sit in a pitcher at table. Steamed and baked puddings were rarely sent out unsauced. The instruction to "remove from range" and the measures given in cups and tablespoons are consistent with a household-science cookbook of the turn of the twentieth century, by which time such measures had largely displaced the older "butter the size of an egg."