Cream Sauce
One cup sugar, half cup butter, one egg, one heaping tablespoon flour. Beat sugar and butter to cream; then add the beaten egg with the flour and stir all together well, then stir nearly a pint boiling milk, place it in a farina kettle and stir until as thick as rich cream. Vanilla to taste.
A pourable sweet sauce for puddings, closer to a thin flour-thickened custard than to a modern crème anglaise. The whole thing hinges on the double boiler: over direct heat the egg curdles before the flour has time to cook out.
- Farina kettleThis is a double boiler — the inner pan sits over simmering, not boiling, water. Any heatproof bowl over a saucepan works, so long as the base does not touch the water.
- "Nearly a pint"Read it as a scant 2 cups (about 450 ml) of milk. The sauce thickens noticeably as it cools, so err toward the full pint if you want it pourable at the table.
- Adding the boiling milkPour it into the creamed sugar, butter, egg and flour in a thin stream while stirring hard. Dumping it in at once will set the egg into threads before the flour can disperse.
- How thick is thick enough"As thick as rich cream" means it coats a spoon and runs off in a sheet. With egg in it the sauce must stay well short of a boil, so judge by thickness rather than by the clock.
- If it breaksButter-heavy sauces of this type will separate if pushed too hot. A brisk whisk off the heat usually brings it back; a strain through a fine sieve deals with any set egg.
- VanillaStir it in off the heat, at the end. The recipe says only 'to taste', and period extracts varied a good deal in strength, so add cautiously and taste as you go.
- Yield and servingRoughly three cups, enough for six to eight servings. Intended warm over steamed or baked puddings, cottage pudding, and plain cake; it reheats gently over water.
Sweet cream sauces like this one are the poured accompaniment that made a plain boiled or baked pudding worth eating, and many American household books of the late nineteenth century carry several under names like cream sauce, pudding sauce or vanilla sauce. The distinguishing feature here is the creamed butter and sugar: rather than a straight custard, it is built like a cake batter and then let down with hot milk, which gives a richer, glossier body and a little insurance against curdling. The "farina kettle" of the instruction was a familiar piece of kit, a lidded inner pot suspended in an outer water pot, sold for cooking the breakfast farina and cereal porridges from which it took its name — and pressed into service, as here, for anything with egg in it that must not boil.