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Sherry Sauce (Tablespoons butter cup sugar)
3 tablespoons butter. 1/2 cup sugar. 2 egg yolks well beaten. 3/4 cup cream. 3 tablespoons sherry wine.
Few grains salt. ⅛ teaspoon nutmeg.
PROCESS: Cream butter, add sugar, egg yolks, salt and gradually the cream, stirring constantly. Cook over hot water until mixture coats the spoon; add sherry and beat again. Turn in a sauce boat and sprinkle with nutmeg.
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A stirred custard sauce in the old style, thickened by yolks alone and finished with sherry off the heat. Nothing here is difficult, but the cooking window is narrow.
- The hinge: coats the spoonThe custard is done at roughly 170-175F, when a finger drawn across the coated spoon leaves a clean track that does not run. Past about 180F the yolks curdle. Use a bowl over barely simmering water, not a rolling boil, and pull it the moment it thickens.
- Add the sherry off the heatAdd the sherry after cooking -- The recipe adds the sherry only after the custard has thickened, then beats it again. Whatever the reason in the original, it is safer practice: a thickened yolk custard is easiest to break when hot, so lift the bowl off the water before beating the wine in.
- Cream, then and now"Cream" in an American book of this period is usually richer than today's half-and-half and lighter than heavy cream, roughly in the light-cream range. Heavy cream gives a thicker, richer sauce; half-and-half is thinner than what was probably meant and will thicken more slowly.
- The nutmeg measurement1½ teaspoons of nutmeg is a great deal for a sauce built on 3 tablespoons of butter and 3/4 cup of cream, and the process calls for nutmeg only as a sprinkle over the filled boat. Read it as a garnish and start with a light grating.
- Sherry to useA dry to medium amontillado or oloroso suits this better than cream sherry, which pushes an already sweet sauce over. Avoid supermarket "cooking sherry," which is salted.
- Rescue and storageIf it begins to grain, pour it at once through a fine sieve and beat hard, or buzz it briefly with an immersion blender. It keeps two days covered in the refrigerator and can be served cold or gently rewarmed over water.
- YieldAbout 1¼ cups, enough for six servings poured over steamed pudding, baked apples, gingerbread or plum pudding.
Wine sauces of this type descend from the English sweet-sauce tradition that came to American tables with plum pudding and steamed puddings generally, and they appear in nineteenth-century cookbooks under a family of names -- hard sauce, foamy sauce, wine sauce, sherry sauce -- distinguished largely by whether the butter is beaten cold or the eggs cooked warm. This one is close to a crème anglaise, but made with cream and enriched with creamed butter, which gives it more body than a thin poured custard and lets it sit on a slice of pudding instead of running off. The sauce boat came to the table separately, so a plain baked or steamed dessert could be dressed at each plate. Sherry was a common fortified wine in American kitchens of the period, keeping well once opened and used in cooking as well as at table.