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Punch Sauce, for Sweet Puddings
Rub a large fresh lemon with two or three lumps of sugar till all the yellow part is taken off, then add more sugar to make up the weight to two ounces. Pour over this a glassful of sherry or Madeira, and a glassful of brandy. Mix a table-spoonful of flour smoothly with two ounces of fresh butter, and add, gradually, the well-beaten yolks of four eggs, the flavoured sugar, etc. Turn the whole into a saucepan, and whisk briskly over a gentle fire until it begins to thicken; serve very hot. The sauce must not reach the point of boiling. If liked, the eggs can be omitted, and the wine, etc., can be mixed with half a pint of melted butter. Time, two or three minutes to boil the sauce. Probable cost, exclusive of the wine and brandy, 10d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A wine-and-brandy egg sauce for hot puddings, essentially a sabayon by another name. Two details in the text will mislead a modern reader: the size of a "glassful" and what Victorian cooks meant by "melted butter."
- Do not let it boilThe yolks do most of the thickening, and above roughly 180F they scramble and the sauce breaks. Whisk constantly over the lowest heat, or set the pan in barely simmering water, and pull it off the moment it coats the whisk.
- A glassfulThe recipe does not say what glass. A wineglassful in this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, which would give roughly 2 oz sherry or Madeira and 2 oz brandy for the full quantity. On any reading it is a strongly alcoholic sauce by modern taste; the brandy can be cut back without harming the texture.
- Rubbing the lemon with sugarDragging sugar lumps across the peel pulls out the zest oils along with the colour. Two ounces of sugar is about 4 tablespoons. Zesting the lemon and stirring the zest into granulated sugar gives the same result, though the lump method extracts more oil.
- "Melted butter" in the egg-free versionThis does not mean liquid butter. In Victorian usage melted butter is a white sauce of butter, flour and water or milk, thickened on the stove. Half a pint is 10 fl oz in British measure, so the alternative sauce is a flour-thickened base flavoured with wine and brandy.
- The flour and butterTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons; a tablespoon of flour into that is a very loose paste rather than a proper roux. Work it smooth off the heat before the yolks go in, or the flour will show as lumps in the finished sauce.
- Timing"Two or three minutes to boil the sauce" means two or three minutes of whisking over heat, not boiling. Over a genuinely gentle flame it may well take longer.
- Yield and servingEnough for six or seven, and it must go to the table hot and freshly made; it will not hold or reheat. Intended for the sweet puddings of the title.
"Punch sauce" is generally said to take its name from the drink rather than any dish: the combination of citrus peel, sugar, fortified wine and spirit is punch in all but the water, thickened into something spoonable for a pudding. It belongs to the family of pudding sauces that existed to carry the alcohol that a Victorian boiled pudding was expected to arrive with. The technique is the same as Italian zabaglione and French sabayon, both of which whisk yolks, sugar and a fortified wine over gentle heat; the tablespoon of flour here gives the cook a margin of error that a pure sabayon does not allow. The alternative given at the end, mixing the wine into "melted butter" instead, is offered as a simpler form.