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Cream Sauce (One tea-cup powdered white)
One tea-cup powdered white sugar, scant half tea-cup butter, half tea-cup rich cream; beat butter and sugar thoroughly, add cream, stir the whole into half tea-cup boiling water, place on stove for a few moments, stirring it constantly, take off and add flavoring.
A warm dessert sauce of the type poured over steamed and boiled puddings — essentially hard sauce loosened with cream and hot water and briefly heated. It comes together in five minutes and depends entirely on not letting it boil.
- The teacupNineteenth-century receipts of this kind are usually reckoned at about 6 fluid ounces to the tea-cup, or three-quarters of a modern cup, with a coffee cup taken as larger; the book does not spell this out. It is not a precise measure; if you scale the recipe, keep the proportions (4 parts sugar to roughly 2 parts each butter, cream and water — the butter is called "scant") rather than chasing exact volumes.
- Powdered white sugarIn 1877 this meant granulated sugar ground fine, not today's confectioners' sugar, which carries cornstarch. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closest match; modern powdered sugar will work but gives a slightly cloudy, starchy body.
- Do not let it boilThe recipe gives no explicit warning, but keeping it below a boil is the safer course: butter and cream in a hot sugar syrup can separate if pushed hard. "A few moments" on the stove means just long enough to warm through and thicken slightly, perhaps a minute, stirring the whole time.
- Rich cream"Rich cream" in these books means the thickest cream skimmed from the pan; modern heavy cream is the nearest equivalent. Half-and-half or light cream makes a thin sauce that separates more readily.
- Butter and saltThe butter in these books was often salted farm butter, and a little salt sharpens the sweetness considerably. If you use unsalted, add a pinch.
- FlavoringAdded off the heat so it does not cook away. Vanilla, lemon extract or grated nutmeg were the usual household choices; sherry, brandy or Madeira, a tablespoon or two, was the festive one, and suits plum and suet puddings.
- Yield and servingRoughly a cup and a half — enough for six to eight servings of pudding. Serve it hot from the pan; it stiffens as it cools and can be rewarmed gently over low heat or in a bowl set over hot water, never directly at a simmer.
Sweet cream sauces of this kind belong to the long English tradition of pudding sauces that came into American cookery wholesale, in which hard sauce — butter creamed with sugar and eaten cold — is often said to be the older form. This version simply warms and thins that mixture so it pours, a practical answer for a household serving boiled Indian pudding, plum pudding, cottage pudding or a plain steamed batter, all of which are dry enough to need moistening. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, an 1877 Ohio compilation that grew out of the 1876 Centennial Buckeye Cook Book assembled by Methodist churchwomen, prints several such sauces in close succession, distinguished mainly by whether they contain egg, wine or cream — the assumption being that a cook chose according to what was in the house that day. The reliance on cream rather than egg has sometimes been read as a sign of a kitchen where the dairy was close at hand, though that is inference rather than evidence.