Hard Sauce
1/2 Cupful Snowdrift Few Grains Salt 2 Cupfuls Sifted Powdered or Confectioners' Sugar 1 Teaspoonful Vanilla ¼ Teaspoonful Lemon Juice or a few drops Lemon Extract Stir the Snowdrift till creamy, then beat in the remaining ingredients in the order given.
A shortening-based version of the classic hard sauce served on steamed puddings. Because it is uncooked, everything depends on how thoroughly the fat is creamed before the sugar goes in.
- What Snowdrift wasSnowdrift was a brand of cottonseed-oil shortening promoted heavily in the early twentieth century, and this book appears to be one of its promotional publications. Any solid vegetable shortening substitutes directly; unsalted butter gives a better flavour and is the traditional fat for hard sauce.
- Quantity of fatThe amount of Snowdrift is not stated in the text as printed. Standard hard sauce runs one part fat to two or three parts sugar by volume, so roughly 2/3 to 1 cup of shortening or butter for the 2 cupfuls of sugar given here.
- The lemon juice measureThe teaspoonful figure for lemon juice has lost its fraction and reads as "14", most likely 1/4 teaspoonful; the lemon is there to cut the sweetness, not to be tasted on its own.
- Cream first, sugar secondThe order is the whole method. Beat the fat alone until it is pale and genuinely aerated before any sugar goes in, or the sauce stays grainy and never lightens. A stand mixer on medium for three or four minutes does it.
- Sift the sugarThe recipe specifies sifted sugar, and period confectioners' sugar was liable to be lumpier than today's. Unsifted lumps will not dissolve in an uncooked sauce and show up as gritty specks on the tongue.
- Yield and servingThis makes roughly two to three cups, enough for eight to ten servings of steamed pudding, plum pudding or apple dumpling. Chill it until firm, then serve cold in a mound so it melts against the hot pudding.
- KeepingWith no dairy in it, a shortening-based hard sauce keeps a week or more refrigerated, covered. Let it sit out fifteen minutes before serving so it is scoopable but not soft.
Hard sauce is commonly said to take its name from its texture rather than its taste: by this often-repeated explanation it is the firm, chilled counterpart to the thin "soft" or liquid pudding sauces, and it is generally traced to British Christmas-pudding cookery, where the butter-and-sugar version is still called brandy butter or rum butter. American cookbooks adopted it for steamed puddings, mince pie and baked apples, usually flavoured with vanilla and a little lemon or spirits. The Snowdrift version reflects a specific commercial moment: hydrogenated cottonseed shortenings arrived in American kitchens in the 1910s and their makers published promotional cookbooks arguing that the new fat could stand in for butter in every use, including uncooked sauces where butter's flavour had always been the point.