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Splendid Pudding Sauce
One cup of butter, two cups of sugar, one-half cup of wine. Stir butter and sugar to a cream, add wine; put all in a farina kettle and let it come to a boiling heat. It will be light and creamy, if made according to direction.
A cooked wine sauce for steamed and boiled puddings — essentially hard sauce warmed over water until it emulsifies. It is rich and short on instruction, so a few notes help.
- Farina kettleThis is a double boiler: an inner pan set over simmering water in an outer one. Any heatproof bowl over a saucepan of water will do, and the gentle heat is the whole point — direct heat will break the sauce.
- "Boiling heat" is not a boil"Boiling heat" is not a rolling boil -- bring it only to the point where the mixture is hot through and steaming; over water it cannot get much past the temperature of the water beneath. If the butter is allowed to boil it can separate into an oily layer with grainy sugar beneath.
- Stir continuouslyStir or beat it while it warms; the recipe's promised "light and creamy" result probably depends on working it during that stage.
- The wineMost likely sherry or Madeira, or another sweet wine; a dry table wine leaves the sauce sour against the sugar.
- SugarUse granulated. Powdered sugar dissolves faster, but modern powdered sugar contains cornstarch, which dulls the gloss.
- ButterOne cup is two sticks.
- Yield and servingAbout two and a half cups — enough for a pudding serving ten or twelve. Send it to the table warm in a pitcher or sauce boat, poured over plum pudding, cottage pudding or steamed fruit pudding.
- KeepingIt refrigerates for a week and reheats over water, whisked. It will look separated when cold; warmth and stirring restore it.
Pudding sauces of this kind sit between two older English traditions: hard sauce, which is butter and sugar creamed raw and left to melt on the hot pudding, and the wine sauces thickened with egg or flour that appear throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookery. This version splits the difference -- no thickener, no eggs, just butter, sugar and wine brought together with heat until they emulsify. The instruction to use a farina kettle is a small clue to the period kitchen: the double boiler was a familiar piece of American equipment by the later nineteenth century, sold for cooking farina and other breakfast cereals, and it was a natural choice for anything that scorched easily. The closing line -- "it will be light and creamy, if made according to direction" -- is the sort of assurance often found in household cookbooks of the era.