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Pudding Sauce (One gill of Maderia wine one)
One gill of Maderia wine, one egg, the white beaten separately, the yolk beaten with one-half cup of sugar. Heat the wine to a boil, stir the white of the egg in with yolk and sugar, and turn the wine on boiling hot.
A wine sauce of the sabayon family, meant to be poured hot over a steamed or boiled pudding. It is short enough that the whole thing hinges on how the hot wine meets the egg.
- The gillOne gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. That plus one egg and half a cup of sugar yields roughly three-quarters of a cup of sauce, enough for two to four servings of pudding.
- The hinge: temper, do not dumpAdd the boiling wine to the egg and sugar in a thin stream while whisking hard, not all at once. Poured in fast, the yolk sets in threads and the sauce goes grainy.
- Read the order of operationsAs written, the yolk is beaten with the sugar, the white is beaten separately and stirred in with the yolk and sugar, then the hot wine goes in. The beaten white is what makes the sauce frothy rather than syrupy, so combine it gently and use the sauce at once.
- Egg temperatureHalf a cup of boiling wine will not reliably carry an egg to 160F. If that matters to you, use pasteurized eggs, or set the finished sauce over barely simmering water and whisk until it thickens and reaches 160F on an instant-read thermometer.
- Which MadeiraA medium-dry bottling such as Verdelho, or a sweeter Bual, is the right register. Supermarket "cooking Madeira" is salted and will make the sauce taste savory.
- Boiling the wineBring it just to the boil and take it off; a long boil drives off both alcohol and volume, and you need the full half cup of liquid for the sauce to be pourable.
- SweetnessHalf a cup of sugar to half a cup of wine is very sweet by current taste, calibrated to plain steamed and boiled puddings. A third of a cup is closer to modern balance if the pudding itself is sugared.
- ServingServe immediately in a warmed pitcher. Standing sauces of this kind weep and separate within a few minutes, and reheating scrambles them.
Nineteenth-century American dessert chapters almost always carried a run of "pudding sauces" — hard sauce, foaming sauce, lemon sauce, wine sauce — because the puddings themselves were deliberately plain: flour, suet or butter, eggs, sometimes fruit, steamed for hours in a mold or cloth. The sauce supplied the flavor and the occasion. This one is a thin cousin of Italian zabaglione and French sabayon, where yolks, sugar and a fortified wine are whisked over heat into a foam; the American shortcut of pouring boiling wine over the egg mixture gets a similar effect with less patience. Madeira turns up often in these books because, from the colonial period into the nineteenth century, it was among the most popular fortified wines in the United States, valued in part for its reputation for surviving long sea voyages and warm cellars without spoiling.