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Queen's Sauce, for Boiled Plum Puddings
Take half a pint of good melted butter, sweeten it, and flavour with powdered cinnamon or grated lemon-rind. Stir into it a glassful of sherry, or Madeira, and a glassful of rum shrub. Put the sauce into a tureen, grate a little nut meg over the top, and it is ready for serving. Time, a few minutes to prepare. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A sweet dessert sauce built on the Victorian foundation sauce, with two fortifying spirits stirred in off the heat. Two terms in it mean something other than what a modern reader assumes.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn nineteenth-century English cookery books melted butter means a flour-thickened butter sauce — roughly a tablespoon of flour cooked in an ounce or two of butter, let down with water or milk to pouring consistency. Simply melting butter and stirring wine into it will give you a greasy split mess. This is the instruction the whole recipe hangs on.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. With the two glassfuls added you finish with something close to 14 fl oz of sauce.
- A glassfulA wineglass in these books is conventionally about 2 fl oz. Two of them together make roughly half a cup of spirits going into 10 oz of sauce, which is assertive but in period character for a plum pudding sauce.
- Rum shrubNot plain rum. Shrub was a sweetened cordial of rum with citrus juice and peel, sold ready-made by Victorian grocers and wine merchants. Modern craft shrub syrups are non-alcoholic drinking vinegars and are not the same thing; rum plus a spoonful of lemon or orange syrup gets closer.
- Add the alcohol off the heatThe sherry and shrub go in at the end, stirred into the finished sauce. Boiling after they are added drives off the spirit and can break the emulsion of a flour-thickened sauce.
- SweeteningNo quantity is given. Two to three tablespoons of caster sugar in the half-pint suits a rich boiled pudding; the shrub brings its own sugar, so taste before adding more.
- ServingThe recipe has it turned into a tureen and finished with grated nutmeg on top. It thickens as it stands. Stated as sufficient for six to eight.
Boiled plum pudding demanded a sauce, and Victorian tables offered a graded series of them: plain sweet melted butter at the modest end, brandy butter or hard sauce, and at the top the fortified sauces given royal or ceremonial names. "Queen's sauce" is one of a family of such titles — Queen's pudding, Queen's soup, Queen cakes — where the name signals richness and a little expense rather than any documented connection to a particular monarch. What marks this one out is the rum shrub. Shrub was a standard grocer's and publican's line through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a sweetened citrus-and-spirit cordial, and its appearance here is a reminder that Victorian cooks reached for bottled cordials the way a modern cook reaches for a liqueur.