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Plain Cream Sauce
One pint cream, three table-spoons brown sugar, and half a small nutmeg grated.
An ingredient list rather than a method, which is typical of Buckeye Cookery's sauce chapter: the reader was expected to know that these three things are simply stirred together and poured over a hot pudding. A few notes on quantities and on what the cream would have been.
- What "cream" meantIn 1877 this was skimmed off the top of a pan of milk, and its richness varied a good deal from batch to batch, somewhere in the range of modern light to heavy cream. Heavy or whipping cream is the closest match; half-and-half will give a thin, sweetish milk rather than a sauce.
- A pintTwo cups. That yields about two cups of sauce, enough for six to eight servings over a steamed or baked pudding.
- Half a small nutmegA whole nutmeg grates down to roughly two teaspoons, so half a small one is about three-quarters of a teaspoon. Grate it fresh; the pre-ground jar is flatter and this sauce has nothing else in it to hide behind.
- Dissolving the sugarBrown sugar dissolves slowly in cold cream. Whisk it in and let the mixture stand fifteen minutes, or warm it gently without boiling until it is smooth, then chill if you want it cold.
- The brown sugar itselfNineteenth-century brown sugar was a partly refined sugar with more molasses character than today's light brown. Use dark brown for a closer flavor, light brown for a milder sauce.
- ServingThe book gives no serving direction; a sauce like this would have been poured over hot puddings or dumplings. Whipped to soft peaks first, with the sugar and nutmeg folded in, it becomes the era's sweetened whipped cream.
Sauces like this one belong to a period when a pudding was rarely served bare, and when the household with a cow had cream on hand daily and no way to keep it long. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Marysville, Ohio, and first published in 1877, gathered contributions from midwestern housewives and prints a number of pudding sauces of this kind: cream, butter or egg thickened, sweetened, and scented with whatever spice was in the house. Nutmeg was a common choice. It kept well whole, and had long been a standard flavoring for milk and cream dishes in English and American cooking. The book calls this version "plain" while richer siblings in the same chapter add eggs, wine or brandy.