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Cold Cream Sauce
Beat together one cup sugar and half cup butter, and add a cup rich cream. Stir all to a cream, flavoring with vanilla or lemon, and place where it will get very cold before serving. -Mrs. A. Wilson.
This is a dessert sauce in the hard-sauce family, meant to be spooned cold onto hot steamed or baked puddings. Nothing is cooked, so the only technique that matters is getting the butter and sugar properly aerated before the cream goes in.
- The hinge: cream the butter and sugar firstBeat the softened butter with the sugar until pale and fluffy before adding any cream. If you dump everything together, the sugar stays gritty and the cream loosens the mixture into a puddle rather than a soft, thick sauce.
- Add the cream slowlyA cup of cream is a lot of liquid for half a cup of butter. Trickle it in while beating, as you would for a mayonnaise, or the emulsion breaks and the butter separates out in flecks.
- SugarHousehold sugar of the period was often coarser than modern granulated. Superfine or confectioners' sugar dissolves faster and gives a smoother sauce; if using granulated, allow several minutes of beating.
- "Rich cream"The original assumed unhomogenised farm cream, likely richer than most cream sold today. Heavy or double cream is the safest substitution; thinner creams will give a looser sauce.
- FlavouringVanilla here most likely means extract, about a teaspoon. "Lemon" may mean lemon extract; a teaspoon of finely grated zest plus a squeeze of juice is a workable alternative.
- "Very cold"An hour in the refrigerator is enough. It firms to the consistency of a thick frosting; stir it briefly before serving if it has stiffened too far.
- Yield and servingAbout two to two and a half cups, enough for eight to ten servings of pudding. It is intended to melt on contact with something hot, so serve the pudding straight from the steamer or oven.
- KeepingCovered and refrigerated, it holds three or four days. Butter picks up other flavours readily, so keep it sealed.
Cold sauces built on creamed butter and sugar were the standard accompaniment to boiled and steamed puddings throughout the Anglo-American nineteenth century, appearing under names like hard sauce, brandy butter, and in the American temperance-leaning household books, simply cream sauce or cold sauce. The point was contrast: a dense, hot, spice-heavy pudding met a cold, sweet, fat-rich sauce that melted into it at the table. Buckeye Cookery, first published in 1877 in Marysville, Ohio, by the Buckeye Publishing Company as a compilation of contributed receipts from Ohio and Midwestern housewives, is full of these attributed one-paragraph entries, and the credit line to Mrs. A. Wilson is typical of how the book worked, as a printed version of the recipe exchange that already went on among neighbours. The absence of any spirit here is worth noting; English versions of the same sauce almost always took brandy or sherry, while this recipe simply omits it.