Hard Sauce
1/2 cup butter. Sherry wine, brandy or vanilla. 1 cup powdered sugar.
PROCESS: Cream butter, add sugar slowly, stirring constantly (this gives sauce a fine, smooth grain). Flavor as desired and pass through pastry bag and rose tube onto serving dish. Sprinkle with nutmeg.
A two-ingredient sauce whose success rests entirely on texture, and whose printed ingredient list forgot to name the butter at all.
- The missing butterThe list gives sugar, flavoring and nutmeg but no butter quantity, though the process begins by creaming it. Comparable hard sauces use somewhere between a third and an equal volume of butter to sugar; roughly 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter to the 1 cup sugar here is a reasonable reading, and more butter gives a softer, richer sauce.
- "Powdered sugar"In American books of this era powdered sugar often meant a fine granulated sugar rather than today's cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Either works here, but confectioners' dissolves without grittiness and is the safer choice for a sauce that is never heated.
- Softened, not meltedButter should be at cool room temperature, around 65F. If it warms past the point where it holds air, the sauce breaks into a greasy paste and no amount of beating brings it back.
- Add the sugar slowlyThis is the hinge. The fine grain the recipe promises comes only from working the sugar in gradually so the butter stays aerated; dumping it in at once gives a dense, sandy sauce.
- Flavoring quantitiesThe recipe leaves these open; something like 1 to 2 tablespoons sherry or brandy, or a teaspoon of vanilla, suits this amount. Add spirits a few drops at a time at the end, as liquid worked in quickly can cause the mixture to separate.
- The pastry bagA rose tube is a fluted star tip. The sauce must be firm enough to hold the piping, so if it has gone slack, chill it 15 minutes before filling the bag.
- ServingChill until firm and serve cold against a hot pudding, which is the whole point of the contrast. The recipe gives no yield, but a cup of sugar creamed with butter makes enough for a family-sized pudding; nutmeg is best grated fresh over the piped rosettes just before it goes to the table.
Hard sauce takes its name from its state rather than its taste: a cold, firm sauce set against a hot steamed pudding, as opposed to the soft or liquid pudding sauces common in books of this kind. The English form, flavored with brandy and called brandy butter, is traditionally tied to Christmas plum pudding. The piping instruction suggests a relatively late date: by the early twentieth century the pastry bag was no longer confined to the professional confectioner, and a sauce that might once have been simply mounded in a bowl could be expected to arrive as a dish of rosettes dusted with nutmeg.