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An Excellent Pudding Sauce
One cup sugar, one-half cup butter, stir to a perfect cream. After this is done, add three or four tablespoonfuls of red raspberry jam or ripe strawberries. Currant jam is also very nice. If the jam chills it, as is sometimes the case, set the bowl over the tea-kettle for a few minutes.
This is a creamed hard sauce, not a cooked one: the sugar and butter are beaten together raw and the fruit folded in. The only technical demand is that the mixture stays emulsified.
- Butter temperature is the hingeSoftened butter at about 65F will cream smoothly with the sugar; cold butter will not, and melted butter gives a greasy, separated sauce. The instruction to "stir to a perfect cream" means beating until the mixture is pale and no longer grainy, three to four minutes with a hand mixer.
- Which sugarGranulated sugar of the period was not always as fine as today's, and some recipes of the era seem to assume a degree of grit. For a smooth sauce use confectioners' sugar, or superfine; with standard granulated, beat longer and let the sauce stand ten minutes so the crystals dissolve.
- "Over the tea-kettle"This is an improvised double boiler. Cold jam can firm the butter into lumps, so the bowl is set in the steam from a kettle for a minute or two and stirred until it comes back together. A bowl over an inch of barely simmering water does the same thing; take it off the moment it loosens, or the butter will break out as oil.
- Ripe strawberriesFresh berries carry considerably more water than jam and will thin the sauce and shorten its life. Mash and drain them first, or use a thick preserve for a sauce that holds its shape.
- Quantity and yieldOne cup sugar with half a cup butter and the jam makes something over a cup of sauce, enough for six to eight servings spooned over a steamed or baked pudding. It is very sweet, and suits plain suet, bread or cottage puddings better than an already-sweet cake.
- Serving and keepingServe at cool room temperature so it half melts on the hot pudding. It keeps a week covered in the refrigerator, but needs to come back to room temperature and be rebeaten before it looks right again.
Sauces of this kind — butter and sugar beaten to a cream, sometimes flavored with wine, brandy, rosewater or, as here, jam — were the standard accompaniment to the boiled and steamed puddings that dominated Anglo-American dessert cookery through the nineteenth century. The plain version is generally known as "hard sauce," chiefly in American usage, so called because it is served firm and cold against a hot pudding; American books also gave it simply as "pudding sauce." The choice of raspberry, strawberry or currant jam here reflects what a home cook might have had on the pantry shelf from the summer's putting-up. Recipes like this one also show how much of the period's dessert repertoire depended on a dressing rather than on the pudding itself, which was frequently a thrifty affair of stale bread, suet or leftover rice.