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Plum Pudding Sauce
One cup of powdered or granulated sugar, half a cup of butter, two well beaten eggs, one cup of boiling wine,-currant, sherry or angelica.
A wine sauce of the old school, meant to be spooned hot over a steamed plum pudding. As written it is an uncooked egg sauce, and that is the problem with it.
- Why it failsThe only heat in the recipe is one cup of boiling wine stirred into a cold mass of sugar, butter and two raw eggs. Once that liquid is diluted by a greater volume of cold ingredients, the mixture lands far below the 160F needed to make egg safe, and no further cooking is directed. The alcohol in a sweet or fortified wine will not pasteurize anything either.
- What the book assumedSome nineteenth-century wine sauces were finished over hot water and stirred until they thickened, and it is possible that step was taken as understood here. This version leaves it out entirely, which is why it should not be followed as printed. Use a current recipe for a cooked wine or custard sauce instead.
- AngelicaA sweet fortified California wine, historically made from Mission grapes. It is still produced but rarely stocked; it is not the candied angelica stem sold for decorating cakes.
- Currant wineHomemade red or white currant wine, a standard product of farm kitchens in this period and effectively unavailable commercially now. Its presence in the list tells you the sauce was built around whatever sweet wine the house already had.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this era "powdered" means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold today. The recipe offers granulated as an equal alternative, which confirms it.
- YieldAbout two cups of sauce, enough for six to eight servings of pudding.
Plum pudding arrived at the American table as an inherited English Christmas dish, and by the late nineteenth century many general cookbooks carried a short cluster of sauces to go with it: hard sauce, brandy sauce, foamy sauce, and this wine sauce. The rich butter-sugar-egg base beaten with hot liquid is a distant relative of sabayon and zabaglione, simplified for a household that wanted something poured rather than whisked to a foam. The list of wines is telling. Currant wine points to home production, sherry to the imported trade, and angelica to the California wine industry, whose sweet fortified bottlings were sold in the East in this period. A cook could reach for whichever of the three was in the sideboard.