Home › The Principles of Cookery › Victoria Sauce for Sweet Puddings
Victoria Sauce for Sweet Puddings
Beat the yolk of an egg with three table-spoonfuls of cream; boil a table-spoonful of sugar to a syrup with a little water, stir into it the egg, etc., and a dessert-spoonful of Curacoa. Beat the sauce rapidly over the fire till it begins to thicken; it is then ready for serving. It should look like rich cream. Time, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
VICTORIA SOUP (said to have been a favourite with Queen Victoria). Wash half a pound of best Carolina rice. Throw it into boiling water, and boil it quickly for ten minutes. Drain it, put it in a stewpan, and pour upon it three pints of good nicely-flavoured white stock. Let it simmer gently till quite tender. Put aside two heaped table-spoonfuls of the rice; rub the rest through a sieve, and stir the pulp into the stock. Let it boil, and pour it upon the whole rice. Season with salt and pepper if required, and stir into it half a pint of boiling cream or milk. Serve immediately. If liked, pearl barley may be used instead of rice. It must, of course, be partially boiled in water to remove the impurities before it is put into the stock. Time to boil the rice, about an hour and a half. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
Two entries run together here: a warm liqueur custard sauce and, following it, a cream of rice soup. Both are workable as written, with a few conversions and one timing that should be ignored.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the yolk goes in, the sauce must stay below a simmer or it will scramble into threads. Beat it constantly over low heat, or over a bowl of barely simmering water if you want insurance, and pull it off the moment it coats the spoon.
- That quarter of an hourThe stated time probably covers the whole operation rather than the whisking alone. A single yolk with three tablespoons of cream thickens in two to four minutes over gentle heat; fifteen minutes on the fire will give you sweet omelette.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons; period tables often counted two dessertspoons to the tablespoon. The recipe says only 'a little water' for the syrup -- about a tablespoon to the tablespoon of sugar, boiled just until clear and slightly thickened, not to any candy stage.
- CuracoaCuraçao, the bitter-orange liqueur. Any orange liqueur works; Grand Marnier or triple sec give the same effect, and a strip of orange zest steeped in the syrup covers it if you are avoiding alcohol.
- Yield of the sauceThe quantities come to only about five spoonfuls in all, so 'four or five persons' amounts to roughly a spoonful each over pudding. Scale up by whole yolks rather than trying to split one.
- Carolina rice and white stockCarolina rice was the standard long-grain of the period; ordinary long-grain is the equivalent. White stock is unbrowned chicken or veal stock, kept pale on purpose so the soup stays ivory.
- Rice timing in the soupTen minutes in boiling water, then simmering in stock; the stated hour and a half is far longer than modern rice needs. It will collapse to pulp in 30 to 40 minutes of simmering, which is all the recipe actually requires.
- Rubbing through a sieveA blender or stick blender does this in seconds, though a sieve afterwards still catches the husky bits and gives the velvety texture the recipe is after. Reserve the two spoonfuls of whole grains before you blend.
- Finishing creamThe recipe wants the half pint of cream or milk boiling when it goes in, so heat it separately; adding it cold dulls the soup and cools it below serving temperature.
Cassell's arranges its entries alphabetically, which is why a pudding sauce and a soup sit shoulder to shoulder here with nothing in common but a name. Dishes christened for Queen Victoria multiplied through the second half of the nineteenth century, attached to everything from sponge sandwiches to consomm\, it is said, more a compliment than a record of what the Queen ate; the book itself hedges with "said to have been a favourite." Both recipes belong to a class of refined invalid-and-dinner-party cookery built on white stock, sieved starch and cream, where the goal was pallor and smoothness. The liqueur sauce reflects the same period's fondness for Curaçao.