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Current-Jelly Sauce
Cream 2 tablespoonfuls butter; add gradually 3/4 cupful stiff currant jelly slightly softened by standing in warm room. Beat well, and serve very cold.
An uncooked butter sauce in the hard-sauce family, but sweetened and coloured entirely by the jelly rather than by powdered sugar. It comes together in five minutes and lives or dies on temperature control.
- The hinge: keep both parts coolThe butter wants to be plastic and creamy, cool room temperature rather than warm, and the jelly only soft enough to break up, not liquid. If either gets too warm the mixture is liable to go greasy and slack rather than smooth.
- Softening the jellyStanding in a warm room means leaving it out until it yields, not a microwave or a hot-water bath. If the jelly has set very firm, work it smooth with a fork or briefly with a whisk before adding it to the butter.
- Add gradually means itCurrant jelly is mostly sugar and water, and butter takes it best a spoonful at a time. Adding it all at once is likely to give a slack, separated sauce.
- The jellyRed currant jelly is the intended article: tart, firm-set, high in pectin. Supermarket red currant jelly works; grape or apple jelly is sweeter and softer and gives a slacker, blander sauce.
- ButterUnsalted, at cool room temperature. A pinch of salt in the finished sauce sharpens the fruit if your butter is unsalted.
- Serving very coldTurn it into a small dish and chill it well before serving. With this much jelly to so little butter it will stay soft rather than stiff, and is meant to melt against a hot pudding.
- YieldNearer a cup once the butter is beaten in, enough to serve alongside a plain steamed or baked pudding.
- KeepingCovered and chilled it will keep for some days. Let it stand briefly out of the refrigerator before serving so it is cold but not stony.
Pudding sauces commonly occupy their own chapter in English and American household books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alongside deliberately plain puddings: suet, batter, bread, cornstarch. This one is a variation on hard sauce, the creamed butter-and-sugar paste usually associated with English Christmas cookery, with currant jelly standing in for both the sugar and the brandy. Red currants were widely grown in American kitchen gardens and their jelly set reliably firm without commercial pectin; the same jelly was also served beside roast lamb and venison and stirred into gravies. The recipe's brevity is typical of household compilations of the era, which assumed a cook who already knew what creamed butter should look like.