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Plum Pudding, Sauce For
Plum pudding, when served at Christmas, is generally sent to table with brandy only poured over it and lighted. At other times, or when sauce is required, sweetened melted butter, flavoured or not with brandy, may be served in a tureen, or any of the following sauces. Rich Sauce-Take two spoonfuls of pounded lump sugar, and, if liked, a pinch of grated lemon-rind. Put it into a bowl by the side of the fire, and pour over it a table-spoonful of brandy and two ounces of clarified butter. When the sugar is thoroughly dissolved, pour in another table-spoonful of brandy, and a glass of sherry. Stir the sauce a minute, and pour it over the pudding, or serve in a tureen. If liked, the mixture may be stirred into a quarter of a pint of thick melted butter, and sent to table with a little nutmeg grated over it. Time, five or six minutes. Sufficient for four or five persons. Almond Sauce.-Blanch an ounce of sweet almonds and four bitter ones, and pound them to a smooth paste with a table-spoonful of orange-flower water. Mix with them three ounces of powdered sugar, and pour over them a quarter of a pint of boiling cream. Stir the whole until it is well mixed. Add the yolks of two eggs, and stir the sauce over a slow fire until it begins to thicken. Whisk it to a froth, and serve. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons. Arrowroot Sauce.--Mix a table-spoonful of arrowroot to a smooth paste with two table-spoonfuls of water. Add two table-spoonfuls of loaf sugar and a third of a pint of milk or water. Stir the sauce over the fire until it boils. Flavour with wine, liqueurs, or any kind of flavouring. Time, fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 3d., made with water and flavoured with lemon. Sufficient for four or five persons.
Three sauces on one page, and one of them is a problem: the almond sauce is built on bitter almonds, which are not a flavouring ingredient in a modern kitchen. The notes below explain that and clear up the Victorian vocabulary in the other two.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted, which is exactly what pounding them to a paste does. Their sale as food is restricted in the UK, US and EU for that reason. Four kernels is a small flavouring quantity rather than a dangerous dose in itself, but it is not an ingredient to source or improvise with: if you want almond sauce, use a current recipe built on sweet almonds and almond extract. The sauce is also thickened with egg yolks only until it "begins to thicken" and then whisked and served, so it may not reliably reach a temperature that pasteurises them. Treat the almond sauce as a historical text rather than instructions.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian English, melted butter means a flour-thickened white sauce made with butter — closer to a thin béchamel than to drawn butter. "A quarter of a pint of thick melted butter" is about 5 fl oz (150 ml) of that sauce, not 5 fl oz of liquid fat.
- Sugar termsLump sugar and loaf sugar are both cane sugar broken from a hard-pressed loaf; pounded lump sugar is simply granulated or caster sugar today. Powdered sugar in this book means finely ground sugar, not the cornflour-cut icing sugar sold under that name in America.
- Liquid measuresAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so a quarter pint is 5 fl oz (150 ml) and a third of a pint is about 6 1/2 fl oz (190 ml). "A glass of sherry" in this period means a sherry glass, roughly 2 fl oz.
- Arrowroot timingThe fifteen minutes given for the arrowroot sauce is far longer than arrowroot wants. It sets almost the moment it reaches a boil, and prolonged cooking or hard boiling breaks the starch down and thins the sauce again.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, though modern versions vary a good deal in strength and may well be stronger than the distilled water this book assumed. A tablespoon in a small sauce could easily read as soapy.
Cassell's is describing an already-fixed Christmas ritual: the pudding arrives with brandy poured over and set alight, and sauce is what you fall back on for the rest of the year, when the same boiled suet-and-dried-fruit pudding turned up as an ordinary family dinner. The three options map onto the household's budget — a brandy-and-sherry sauce for company, an almond and cream custard costing a shilling, and an arrowroot sauce at threepence when made with water and a little lemon. Arrowroot, milled from West Indian Maranta rhizomes, was a cheap invalid-cookery thickener of the Victorian store cupboard, valued for setting clear and tasting of nothing. Bitter almonds appear here as a matter of course: before synthetic benzaldehyde was widely available, a few bitter kernels were one common way to push almond flavour, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cookbooks use them freely in ratafias, macaroons and custards. The hazard was known, but the small doses used in recipes were generally treated as ordinary practice rather than a risk, which is precisely why a page like this needs a modern note attached.