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Wine Sauce for Sweet Puddings
Make a quarter of a pint of good melted butter, sweeten it, flavour with grated lemon or orange-rind, and add a glassful of wine. Mix thoroughly, and serve very hot. If preferred, brandy or rum may be substituted for the wine. Sufficient for five or six persons.
The whole recipe turns on one phrase that no longer means what it says. "Melted butter" in a Victorian English cookbook is a thickened white sauce made with butter, flour and water — not butter melted in a pan.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not a stateIn Victorian English cookery it is butter and flour cooked together and let down with water, then simmered a minute or two until it coats a spoon; a quarter-pint would take on the order of an ounce of butter and a teaspoon of flour. If you simply melt butter and add wine you get a broken, greasy pool.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup. That is the finished volume of the butter sauce before the wine goes in.
- A glassful of wineA wineglass in this period is reckoned at about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Sherry, madeira or a sweet white are the usual choices; anything tannic turns the sauce metallic against the butter.
- SweeteningNo quantity is given. One to two tablespoons of caster sugar suits 5 fl oz of sauce; add it with the liquid so it dissolves, and taste after the wine, which brings its own sugar.
- Rind, not juiceGrate the zest only, avoiding the white pith, and add it late so the oils stay bright. Citrus juice would thin the sauce and risk curdling it.
- Keep it below a boil once the wine is inAdd the wine off the heat and warm gently. Hard boiling drives off some of the alcohol and much of the aroma with it, and can split the sauce.
- ServingStated as sufficient for five or six, which works out at roughly two tablespoons each — correct for a rich boiled or steamed pudding. It thickens as it cools, so send it out in a heated jug or boat.
- Spirits in place of wineBrandy or rum at the same 2 fl oz is considerably stronger in flavour and alcohol; start with half and taste.
Wine sauce belongs to the long English tradition of pouring something sweet, warm and alcoholic over a boiled or steamed pudding — the same instinct behind hard sauce, brandy butter and rum sauce at Christmas. Its base, "melted butter," was the workhorse sauce of nineteenth-century English cookery, so common that books like Cassell's could name it in three words and assume the reader knew the flour-and-water method; foreign observers treated it as the emblem of English sauce-making, and rarely kindly. This is a formula to be learned once and varied endlessly, with the rind, the sugar and the choice of wine or spirit left to the cook's judgement and to what stood in the sideboard.