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Sweet Pudding Sauces
When any unusual sauce is appropriate to a pudding, the recipe is either given in this work with it, or a reference is made to it. The most usual sauces for puddings are--sweet sauce, wine sauce, arrowroot sauces, and fruit sauces. They are made as follows:
Sweet Sauce.--Sweeten a little good melted butter, and flavor it with grated lemon rind, nutmeg, or powdered cinnamon. Strew a little of the grate over the top, and serve in a tureen. A little wine or brandy may be added at pleasure. This sauce is suitable for almost all ordinary boiled puddings. Wine Sauce.--Boil the thin rind of half a lemon or half an orange in a wineglassful of water till the flavor is extracted. Take out the rind, and thicken the sauce by stirring into it a saltspoonful of flour which has been mixed smoothly with a piece of butter the size of a walnut. Boil for a minute, then add half a tumblerful of any good wine. Let the sauce get quite hot without boiling, sweeten, and serve. If port is used, the juice of the lemon may be added.
Superior Wine Sauce.--Take half a tumblerful of light wine (madeira or sherry) and mix thoroughly with it the well-beaten yolks of 2 eggs. Place the bowl in boiling water, add a little sugar, and whisk over the fire till it is nicely frothed. Serve at once.
Arrowroot Sauce.--Mix a tablespoonful of arrowroot smoothly, with a little cold water. Add the third of a pint of water, a glassful of wine, the juice of a lemon, and sugar and flavoring. Stir the sauce over the fire till it boils. This sauce may be varied by omitting the wine, and using milk or milk-and-water with the arrowroot. The juice of almost any fruit, too, may be boiled with the arrowroot.
Fruit Sauces.--Boil fruit (almost any kind may be used) with a little water until it is quite soft. Rub it with the back of a wooden spoon through a fine sieve. Sweeten to taste, make it hot, and pour the sauce over the boiled or steamed pudding.
Five sauces, each a few lines long, written for a cook who already knew the conventions of a Victorian kitchen. Two of those conventions need translating before the first one will work.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn British cookery books of this period melted butter means a thickened butter sauce: about 1 oz butter and 1 tablespoon flour cooked together, then whisked smooth with roughly half a pint of water or milk. Simply melting butter and sweetening it gives a greasy pool, not the sauce intended here.
- The glass measuresA wineglassful is about 2 fl oz (1/4 cup); a tumblerful is usually reckoned at 8 to 10 fl oz, so half a tumblerful is roughly 1/2 cup. A saltspoonful is about 1/4 teaspoon, and butter "the size of a walnut" is somewhere between 1 tablespoon and 1 oz.
- Superior wine sauce is a sabayonYolks and wine whisked in a bowl set over boiling water will thicken and foam in three to five minutes. Keep the bowl clear of the water's surface and never stop whisking; if the mixture stalls or the bowl gets too hot the yolks scramble and cannot be recovered. Take it to about 160F for safety, which is roughly the point at which it holds a soft ribbon.
- Do not boil the wine sauceThe instruction to let the sauce "get quite hot without boiling" after the wine goes in is deliberate: boiling drives off the alcohol and the aromatics that are the whole point of the sauce, and leaves a flat, faintly sour thickened liquid.
- Arrowroot behaves unlike cornstarchIt thickens at a lower temperature and clears the moment it boils. Bring it just to the boil and pull it off; held at a simmer or reheated, arrowroot thins back out and will not recover. It tolerates acid better than cornstarch does, but boiling it for any length of time with a whole lemon's juice will still slacken it, so add the juice at the end if you want a firmer set.
- Fruit sauce, sievedThe back of a wooden spoon through a fine sieve is still a reliable way to get a smooth pur\; tataste before sweetening, since many modern cultivated varieties are sweeter than their nineteenth-century equivalents.
- YieldThe yields vary: about 3/4 cup for the wine sauce, rather more than a cup for the melted-butter and arrowroot sauces, with the fruit sauce depending on the fruit. Reckon on four to six servings poured over a steamed or boiled pudding. Serve in a warmed jug or tureen; all of them, and the sabayon especially, are at their best within minutes of being made.
Sweet pudding sauces existed because Victorian boiled and steamed puddings needed them. A suet or batter pudding turned out of a cloth or basin is dense and dry by design, and the sauce supplied the sweetness, the moisture and the flavouring the pudding itself lacked. That is why a compendium like this treats them as a class rather than attaching one to each pudding: the cook chose from a short standard list according to what was in the house. The "superior wine sauce" here is a frothed custard of the zabaglione and sabayon family, generally traced to Italian practice and long naturalised in English kitchens by the nineteenth century; the arrowroot sauces reflect the Victorian enthusiasm for West Indian arrowroot as a light, clear thickener thought gentler on the digestion than flour, and it was often recommended for invalids and children on exactly those grounds.