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Semi-Hard Sauce with Fruit
¼ Cupful Snowdrift 1 Cupful Powdered Sugar 2 Tablespoonfuls Cream or Top Milk 1 Cupful Crushed Raspberries, Strawberries, or Canned Pineapple, Berries, or Chopped Peaches, or Apricots Few Grains Salt 1½ Tablespoonful Lemon Juice Few Drops Vanilla Cream the Snowdrift and gradually beat in the sugar and cream, alternately. Add the salt and slowly stir in the fruit. Then add the lemon juice and a few drops of vanilla. Serve with any Steamed Pudding, Bread Pudding, Old-Fashioned Rice Pudding, Short Cake, Roly Polys, etc. 2 Squares (ounces) Chocolate 2 Cupfuls Sugar 1/2 Cupfuls Milk
A creamed uncooked dessert sauce of the hard-sauce family, lightened with fruit purée. It comes from a manufacturer's booklet, so the fat called for is the company's own shortening.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening sold from around 1900; later versions were hydrogenated. Any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same way; unsalted butter gives better flavour, though it will firm up harder in the refrigerator.
- The fat quantityThe printed page was checked: the shortening is a quarter cupful, as our text now gives. That is the usual proportion of fat to one cup of powdered sugar in this style of sauce.
- Top milkThe cream that rose to the top of unhomogenised milk, roughly the richness of today's half-and-half. Use light cream or half-and-half.
- Powdered sugarConfectioners' sugar, and it must be that rather than granulated: the sauce is never cooked, so granulated sugar would stay gritty. Sift it if it has caked.
- The hinge — add the fruit slowlyFruit purée is mostly water and will break a creamed fat-and-sugar mixture if dumped in. Beat it in a spoonful at a time and stop while the sauce still holds its shape. Draining crushed berries or canned pineapple first helps considerably.
- Fruit choicesCanned pineapple should be well drained and, if using butter, note that fresh pineapple's enzymes are not an issue here since nothing is set with gelatin. Frozen berries, thawed and drained, work in place of fresh.
- Serving and yieldMakes roughly two cups, enough for six to eight servings spooned over pudding or shortcake. Chill until barely firm; a warm sauce will slump.
Hard sauce is the cold, creamed butter-and-sugar dressing traditionally served on steamed and boiled puddings, and in Britain it is still usually flavoured with brandy or rum. A "semi-hard" version like this one softens it with cream and fruit, which suits the American puddings and shortcakes listed at the end of the recipe. The booklet it comes from was published to promote Snowdrift, one of the cottonseed-oil shortenings that entered American kitchens in the first decades of the twentieth century; such booklets routinely rewrote familiar butter recipes around the new product, and a fruit-flavoured hard sauce made a useful showcase, since the shortening's blandness let the raspberry or peach carry the flavour.