Home › The Principles of Cookery › Paris Sauce, for Sweet Puddings
Paris Sauce, for Sweet Puddings
Put a glassful of sherry into an enamelled saucepan, with a large table-spoonful of powdered sugar and the well-beaten yolks of two eggs. Stir the mixture until it begins to thicken, then add very gradually three table-spoonfuls of thick cream; the sauce must not boil after the cream is added. Time, three or four minutes. Probable cost, exclusive of the sherry, 6d. Sufficient for four persons.
A stirred wine custard in the sabayon family, thin enough to pour over a hot pudding. It is three or four minutes of work, and almost all of the risk sits in the last thirty seconds of it.
- Keep it below a simmerThe hinge is heat: yolks begin to set from around 150F (65C) and a custard of this kind thickens by roughly 160-180F (70-82C), scrambling not far above. Though the recipe uses a saucepan directly, a pan of barely steaming water is safer, and stir constantly with a whisk or wooden spoon so nothing sets on the base.
- A glassful of sherryA Victorian wineglass is conventionally about 2 fl oz. Take it as 1/4 cup; a dry to medium sherry such as amontillado suits sweet puddings better than a cream sherry, given the added sugar.
- Powdered sugarIn this book that means finely ground granulated sugar, what is now sold as caster sugar. Modern powdered or icing sugar contains cornstarch, which will cloud the sauce; caster or ordinary granulated is the right substitute.
- Enamelled saucepanThe instruction is practical, not sentimental. Wine and egg yolk in aluminium or unlined cast iron can take on a metallic taste and a grey cast. Enamel, stainless steel or a glass bowl over water all work.
- Thick creamThis is double cream, roughly 48 per cent butterfat. Heavy or whipping cream at 36 per cent is the closest supermarket equivalent; add it very gradually in a slow stream, as the recipe says, and do not let the sauce boil once it is in.
- If it curdlesPull it from the heat at once, tip it into a cold bowl and whisk hard, or push it through a fine sieve. A sauce that has gone grainy will often come back; one that has scrambled outright will not.
- Yield and servingFour modest servings, something over half a cup in total. It is meant to be poured warm over a steamed or baked pudding and does not hold well - make it while the pudding turns out.
The name points at the French wine-and-egg sauces that English cookery absorbed through the nineteenth century, of which the Italian zabaglione and the French sabayon are the better-known relatives; sherry stands in here for the marsala or white wine those versions use. Cassell's gives a probable cost of sixpence "exclusive of the sherry" - an exclusion that suggests the wine was expected to be already in the house rather than bought for the dish. Sauces of this kind were served with the suet and batter puddings of a Victorian dinner: rich, alcoholic, and made in minutes at the last moment.