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Pudding Sauces, Sweet
When any unusual sauce is appropriate to a pudding, the recipe is either given in this work under the same heading, or a reference is made to it. The most usual sauces for puddings are--sweet sauce, wine sauce, arrowroot sauces, and fruit sauces. They are made as follows. Sweet Sauce.--Sweeten a little good melted butter, and flavour it with grated lemon-rind, nutmeg, or powdered cinnamon. Strew a little of the grated rind over the top, and serve in a tureen. A little wine or brandy may be added at pleasure. This sauce is suitable for almost all ordinary boiled puddings. Wine Sauce.--Boil the thin rind of half a lemon or half an orange in a wine-glassful of water till the flavour is extracted. Take out the rind, and thicken the sauce by stirring into it a salt-spoonful of flour which has been mixed smoothly with a piece of butter the size of a walnut. Boil for a minute, then add half a tumblerful of any good wine. Let the sauce get quite hot without boiling, sweeten, and serve. If port is used, the juice of the lemon may be added. A Superior Wine Sauce.--Take half a tumblerful of light wine (Madeira or sherry), and mix thoroughly with it the well-beaten yolks of two eggs. Place the jar in boiling water, add a little sugar, and whisk over the fire till the sauce is nicely frothed. Serve at once. Arrowroot Sauce.--Mix a table-spoonful of arrowroot smoothly, with a little cold water. Add the third of a pint of water, a glassful of wine, the juice of a lemon, and sugar and flavouring. Stir the sauce over the fire till it boils. This sauce may be varied by omitting the wine, and using milk or milk and water with the arrowroot. The juice of almost any fruit, too, may be boiled with the arrowroot. Fruit Sauces.--Boil fruit (almost any kind may be used) until it is quite soft with a little water. Rub it with the back of a wooden spoon through a fine sieve. Sweeten to taste, make it hot, and pour the sauce over the boiled or steamed puddings.
Five sauces in one entry, all built on techniques a modern cook already has. The one thing that will trip you up is the first ingredient of the first sauce.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn Victorian English this is a specific sauce: butter cooked with flour and then whisked with water or milk and simmered until smooth. Period proportions vary, running from roughly 1 to 2 oz of butter and a teaspoon to a tablespoon of flour to a quarter or half pint of liquid. A pool of plain liquid butter over a sponge pudding is not what is meant, and will taste greasy.
- The measuresA wine-glassful is about 2 fl oz (4 tbsp); a tumblerful is 8-10 fl oz, so half a tumbler is roughly half to two-thirds of a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, and butter "the size of a walnut" is about 1 oz, or 2 tbsp. A third of a pint in this book is imperial, so about 190 ml -- a generous two-thirds to three-quarters of a US cup.
- The wine sauce needs the flour cookedA minute at a boil is the minimum to lose the raw-flour taste from the kneaded butter-and-flour paste. After the wine goes in, keep it below a simmer as instructed, or the alcohol and the aroma both go off and the sauce thins.
- The superior wine sauce is a sabayonYolks, wine and sugar whisked over hot water. Use a bowl set over barely simmering water, not sitting in it, and whisk constantly. It is done when it holds a ribbon and reads about 160F; past that the yolks scramble and no amount of whisking recovers them. It collapses within minutes, so make it last.
- Arrowroot behaves unlike flourIt thickens the moment it boils and then breaks down if held there, going thin and watery. Bring it just to the boil, take it off, and serve.
- Fruit saucesCooking apples, plums, damsons, gooseberries and rhubarb stalks all work; berries need almost no added water. A food mill or a fine sieve gives a better texture than a blender, which pulverises skins and pips and can dull the sauce.
- YieldThe arrowroot sauce and the melted-butter base come to about half a pint, enough for six to eight servings of a steamed or boiled pudding; the wine sauce, at a wine-glass of water plus half a tumbler of wine, makes rather less. The sabayon serves four at most.
- ServingSend starch-thickened sauces to table hot in a warmed jug or tureen, as the book says. They skin quickly; a disc of buttered paper on the surface holds them for a few minutes.
Cassell's is being efficient here rather than inventive: in a kitchen that turned out boiled and steamed puddings regularly, a stock of four or five sauces covered nearly all of them. "Melted butter" was the workhorse of the period; sweetened and scented with lemon rind or nutmeg it became the default accompaniment to suet and batter puddings. The "superior wine sauce" is a sabayon, closely related to Italian zabaglione, which is generally traced to Piedmont and is traditionally made with Marsala; the substitution of Madeira or sherry reflects what an English household actually kept in the cellar. Arrowroot, imported chiefly from the West Indies, was prized in Victorian cookery for setting clear rather than cloudy, which made it the choice for a sauce meant to show off the colour of wine or fruit juice, and it carried a reputation as an invalid food that did it no harm in respectable kitchens.