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Vanilla Cream Sauce
1/4 cup butter, 2/3 cup powdered sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1 cup heavy cream. Work butter until creamy and add sugar gradually, while beating constantly, and vanilla; then add heavy cream beaten until stiff. Place bowl in saucepan of boiling water and stir constantly three minutes. Pour into a warm bowl and serve at once.
A warmed cream sauce in the hard-sauce family, meant to be spooned over a hot pudding the moment it leaves the bowl. Everything depends on gentle heat and constant motion.
- The hinge: it will break if you walk awayButter, sugar and whipped cream held over boiling water separate quickly if the mixture stalls or overheats. Keep the whisk moving for the full three minutes and take the bowl off the water the moment it is warm and glossy rather than waiting for it to thicken.
- "Powdered sugar" in this periodIn American books of the 1900s powdered sugar often meant a fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. Either works here; modern confectioners' sugar dissolves faster and gives a slightly softer set.
- Heavy creamUse cream at 36 percent fat or higher so it whips stiff. Ultra-pasteurised cream whips but deflates faster once warmed, which matters in a sauce that is heated after whipping.
- The bain-marieSet a stainless or glass bowl over a saucepan of boiling water so the base sits clear of the water, not sunk in it. The original says "in" the saucepan; direct contact with the water is more heat than this sauce wants.
- YieldHard to pin down: the whipped volume falls as the sauce is heated and stirred, so expect somewhere upwards of a cup and a half.
- Serve at once means itThe sauce holds no more than a few minutes. Warming the serving bowl first, as directed, buys a little time; reheating it does not work, as the butter will separate out.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, one of the oldest chocolate firms in the United States, issued small recipe booklets for decades as advertising, and the various editions of Choice Recipes drew on contributions credited to well-known cookery writers of the day, Maria Parloa and Janet McKenzie Hill among them. A vanilla cream sauce earns its place in a chocolate book because it is the standard foil: poured over a chocolate pudding or hot chocolate soufflé, the plain sweet cream cuts the density. The technique itself is a hard sauce, the butter-and-sugar mixture English and American kitchens served cold with plum pudding, lightened with whipped cream and then warmed through.