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Yankee Pudding Sauce, for Pancakes and Light Puddings
Beat a table-spoonful of fresh butter to cream, and add a small tea-cupful of powdered white sugar, a dessert-spoonful of sherry or brandy, and a little grated nutmeg. Place the mixture on a dish, grate a little orange or lemon-rind upon it, and serve.
This is a hard sauce — creamed butter and sugar, no heat at any stage — meant to melt over a hot pudding or pancake. Two things decide whether it works: the butter must be soft enough to whip but never oily, and the sugar must be fine enough to dissolve in it.
- The teacupfulA Victorian teacup is usually reckoned at about a quarter of a pint, so "a small tea-cupful" of sugar is somewhere around half a cup, give or take. Against a single tablespoon of butter that is an extremely sweet, stiff, almost fondant-like sauce.
- Adjust the ratio if you want a spoonable sauceModern hard sauce runs closer to equal weights of butter and sugar, or 1/2 cup butter to 1 cup sugar. The original as written is sugar-dominant; scale the butter up if you want it to melt into a cream rather than a sweet paste.
- Dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons. That is the whole quantity of sherry or brandy, and it is enough — more liquid than a couple of teaspoons per tablespoon of butter will make the mixture split.
- "Powdered white sugar"In this period the term means granulated sugar ground fine, not the modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Either works; confectioners' sugar dissolves more readily and gives a smoother sauce, superfine granulated gives a slight sandiness that some prefer.
- Beating to creamButter at about 65F creams properly; straight from the fridge it will not take air, and anything approaching room temperature in a warm kitchen will go greasy. Beat the butter alone first until pale, then work the sugar in gradually.
- Adding the spiritDribble the sherry or brandy in at the very end, a few drops at a time, beating between additions. Adding it all at once curdles the emulsion.
- Serving"Place the mixture on a dish" presumably means shaping it into a mound or pressing it into a small bowl so it holds its form beside the hot pudding and melts on contact; the recipe itself says nothing about chilling. Grate the citrus rind on just before it goes to the table, while the oils are still volatile.
- YieldA small quantity, a few spoonfuls only. It keeps covered in the refrigerator for a week and freezes well.
Hard sauce is a standard English accompaniment to steamed and boiled puddings, and in Britain the brandy-flavoured version is usually called brandy butter and eaten with Christmas pudding. The "Yankee" in the title appears to mark the mixture as served over pancakes and lighter puddings rather than reserved for the heavy festive ones. The name "hard sauce" is often traced to the fact that it is served cold and firm, in contrast to the poured, cooked sweet sauces common in Victorian cookery books, though the derivation is not settled. Its appearance among short reference entries rather than in a chapter of its own is typical of the dictionary format.