Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sweet Sauce, for Puddings
Sweet Sauce, for Puddings
Take half a pint of good melted butter made with milk, sweeten it, and flavour with cinnamon, grated nutmeg, or bitter almonds. Serve very hot. Two table-spoonfuls of cream stirred into the sauce at the last moment will help to enrich it. Time, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 4d. to 6d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A Victorian pudding sauce built on "melted butter," which is not what the phrase now suggests. One of the three flavourings offered is the reason this page carries a caution.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what happens when they are pounded and steeped into a warm sauce. They were an ordinary grocery item in the 1890s and their sale as food is now banned or restricted in a number of countries, including the United States. A sauce flavoured this way should not be made; use a current recipe if you want an almond-scented pudding sauce.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian usage melted butter means a thickened butter sauce — butter worked with flour and let down with liquid, here milk rather than water. Simply melting butter and sweetening it will not give the body the recipe assumes.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fluid ounces, about 1¼ US cups of finished sauce. The two tablespoonfuls of cream at the end are a small proportion by design; they enrich rather than thin.
- The quarter of an hourThat time covers making the butter sauce from scratch and letting the flour cook out, not fifteen minutes of hard boiling. A flour-thickened milk sauce needs only a few minutes at a bare simmer once it has come together.
- Cream at the last momentAdded off the heat or at the lowest simmer, as directed. Boiling after the cream goes in encourages the sauce to break.
- SweeteningNo quantity is given. The sweetening was left to the cook's judgement, weighed against the pudding it accompanied — a plain suet pudding wants more than a rich one.
- Yield and costSix or seven servings from a scant cup and a quarter, so roughly three tablespoons each — a pouring accent rather than a pool. The 4d. to 6d. is a household costing note, not a measurement.
Sweet sauce of this kind is the dessert branch of "melted butter," the flour-and-butter sauce that anchored English cookery for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and drew steady mockery from French-trained cooks, who thought the English poured it over everything. It is a pattern rather than a dish: one base, varied by sweetening and a single aromatic, ready for boiled and baked puddings of every sort. The three flavourings listed track what a Victorian store cupboard held — cinnamon and nutmeg from the colonial spice trade, and bitter almonds, sold freely then as a standard source of almond flavour; the characteristic scent comes from benzaldehyde, which in modern essence is generally produced synthetically. The two spoonfuls of cream at the end are a mark of the book's practical streak: an economical sauce with a small, cheap upgrade written into it.