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Froth Sauce for Puddings
Two cups of fine white sugar, three-fourths of a cup of butter, one cup of wine. Stir sugar and butter to a cream, adding the wine gradually, then put bowl in boiling water and the sauce will froth at once.
— Miss Anna M. Rossell
A creamed wine sauce warmed over water until it foams — the hot cousin of hard sauce. It comes together in minutes and collapses almost as fast, so make it last.
- Serve it the moment it frothsThe foam is butter and dissolved sugar holding air; it falls within a few minutes of leaving the heat and will separate outright if it gets too hot. Have the pudding on the table before you set the bowl over the water.
- "Boiling water" means a bain-marie"Boiling water" -- the recipe says to set the bowl in boiling water. Standing it over, rather than in, a pan of simmering water is the gentler modern reading: direct contact with a hot pan bottom can break the butter out as oil.
- Fine white sugarThis is granulated sugar of a fine grain, closer to today's caster sugar than to confectioners' sugar. Superfine dissolves fastest and gives the smoothest froth; do not substitute powdered, which carries cornstarch.
- What wine was meantA fortified sweet wine, most likely sherry or madeira, sometimes port, is the usual assumption for a pudding sauce of this kind. A dry table wine would read thin against two cups of sugar.
- Add the wine slowly or it curdlesAdd the wine slowly -- the recipe says to add it gradually, and a cup of liquid into three-quarters of a cup of butter is a lot to carry. Beat it in a little at a time; if it separates, whisking hard over the hot water may bring it back.
- The alcohol stays inNothing here is cooked long enough to drive off much of it. Worth knowing before serving to children or anyone avoiding alcohol.
- Yield and useRoughly three cups of sauce from these quantities. The title says only 'for Puddings'; a hot sauce of this sort suits the dense steamed and boiled puddings of the period.
- Sweetness by modern tasteTwo cups of sugar to three-quarters of a cup of butter is very sweet by current standards. Reducing the sugar is likely to give a looser, less stable froth.
Wine sauces for pudding were a fixture of nineteenth-century American cookery, appearing under names like foaming sauce, froth sauce and sauce for plum pudding, alongside the cold creamed hard sauce. They follow British boiled-pudding practice, where the pudding was plain and heavy and the sauce carried the sugar and the spirit. Creaming butter and sugar cold, then warming the mixture over water so it aerates, gets lightness without eggs and without the risk of a heated custard scrambling. That this one arrives under a contributor's name is characteristic of community receipt books, which were commonly compiled from dishes sent in by individual subscribers.