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Other Sweet Dishes: Sauce
CURRANT JELLY SAUCE Cook a cup of currant jelly with a cup of water until smooth; add a tablespoonful of lemon juice.
BREAD PUDDING, VIENNOISE 1 cup of fine soft bread crumbs 1 whole egg and yolk of an- 1/2 cup of dried currants other 1/2 teaspoonful of salt 1/4 cup of sugar 1/2 teaspoonful of cinnamon 1/4 cup of sugar cooked to car- I1/2 cups of milk amel 1/4 cup of boiling water Pour the boiling water over the caramel and let boil to a syrup; add the sugar, the milk and the eggs, beaten light. Mix the crumbs, currants, salt and cinnamon and combine the two mixtures. Turn into buttered-and-sugared molds. Let cook in a dish of water as a custard. Serve hot, turned from the molds, with Sabayon or hard sauce.
ORANGE SABAYON SAUCE Beat one whole egg and one yolk; gradually beat in one-third a cup of sugar. Set the dish over hot water, add the grated rind of an orange, one-third a cup of orange juice and one tablespoonful of lemon juice. Continue beating while the sauce thickens. When thick as a boiled custard, remove to a dish of cold water, to stop the cooking, and serve at once.
CHOCOLATE SOUFFLE 2 tablespoonfuls of butter 1/2 ounces of melted chocolate 2 tablespoonfuls of flour 1/4 cup of sugar 1/4 teaspoonful of salt 2 eggs 3/4 cup of milk Melt the butter and in it cook the flour and salt; add the milk and stir and cook until smooth and thick; add the chocolate, the sugar and the yolks of eggs, beaten light; lastly fold in the whites of the eggs, beaten dry. Bake as a custard. Serve hot, the instant it is done, with whipped cream sweetened and flavored with vanilla, or with frothy or Sabayon sauce. FROTHY SAUCE 1/3 cup of butter 1/3 cup of boiling water 2/3 cup of sugar 1 1/2 tablespoonfuls of wine or White of egg. beaten dry A teaspoonful of vanilla Cream the butter, beat in the sugar and fold in the white of egg; add the boiling water and flavoring. Mix and serve at once.
III A FEW SIMPLE HOT PUDDINGS SCALLOPED RHUBARB WITH MERINGUE Peel the rhubarb and cut into inch lengths. In a buttered dish put a layer of thin slices of sponge cake, and over this a layer of the rhubard; sprinkle with sugar, a grating of yellow orange rind and a few grains of salt; continue the layers until the dish is filled. For half a pound of rhubarb use about three-fourths a cup of sugar. Cover the dish and let bake about half an hour. Beat the whites of two eggs dry; gradually beat in two tablespoonfuls of sugar, then fold in two tablespoonfuls of sugar and spread over the pudding. Let bake about twelve minutes in a very moderate oven. BLUEBERRY BETTY Remove the crust from slices of stale bread. Put the bread, spread with butter, into a pudding-dish in layers, alternating with blueberries. Sprinkle the blueberries with sugar, a little salt, and, if desired, a grating of nutmeg. Have generous layers of blueberries. Squeeze over the whole the juice of half a lemon, or add two tablespoonfuls of water. Cover the dish, and let bake until the berries are tender. Then remove the cover, to brown the top. Serve with cream and sugar.
STEAMED GRAHAM PUDDING 1 cup of graham or of entire 1 egg wheat flour 1/2 cup of molasses 1/2 cup of white flour 1/2 cup of milk 1/2 teaspoonful of salt 4 tablespoonfuls of melted 1 teaspoonful of soda butter 1 teaspoonful of cinnamon, 3/4 cup of fruit mace and cloves, mixed Sift together the dry ingredients. Beat the egg; add the milk, molasses and butter and stir into the dry ingredients; add the fruit. Use for fruit, raisins, currants, citron, candied peel, chopped figs, dates or prunes, one or a combination of two or more. Steam two and one half hours. Serve with hard sauce.
A run of small hot puddings and their sauces, scaled for two, from a book that assumes a coal range and a cook who already knows what "bake as a custard" means. A few of the printed quantities have been mangled in typesetting; the notes below flag them.
- Bake as a custardThis means a water bath: set the buttered molds or dish in a pan and pour in hot water to come halfway up. The book gives no temperature or time; a moderate oven, around 325F, suits custards. Bake the bread-pudding molds until a knife comes out clean, and the chocolate souffle only until just set -- it will not wait once it leaves the oven.
- Oven words"A very moderate oven" for the rhubarb meringue is on the low side, somewhere around 300-325F in modern terms, hot enough to set and lightly color the whites without weeping. No temperature is given for the covered rhubarb or the blueberry Betty; a moderate oven of about 350F works for both.
- The chocolate quantity is a misprint"1/2 ounces of melted chocolate" should read 1 1/2 ounces, which is consistent with the 3/4 cup of milk and 1/4 cup sugar. Use unsweetened baking chocolate, not modern semisweet, or the souffle will be cloying.
- Sugar cooked to caramelMelt the 1/4 cup of sugar dry in a heavy pan until deep amber, then stand back and add the 1/4 cup of boiling water; it will spit violently. The syrup goes in with the second 1/4 cup of sugar and the milk. Cold water into hot caramel will seize it into a lump.
- Sabayon needs a low handKeep the bowl over hot, not boiling, water and beat continuously. Orange and lemon juice make the mixture acidic, which sets the egg faster than a plain custard would; the moment it holds a ribbon, get it into the cold-water bath. Overheated, it curdles and cannot be recovered.
- Frothy sauce contains uncooked whiteThe boiling water is not enough to bring beaten egg white to a safe temperature. Use pasteurized whites, or serve the souffle with the sabayon or plain sweetened whipped cream instead. The kind of wine is not specified in the printed text, which breaks off mid-line.
- CurrantsThe half cup in the bread pudding is dried currants, the small Zante raisins, not fresh red currants. The jelly sauce at the top is a separate thing again, made from red currant jelly, which is still sold and is the best match for the tartness the recipe expects.
- Graham flour and the sodaGraham flour is coarse whole wheat; whole wheat flour is a fair substitute, though the crumb will be slightly finer. The teaspoon of soda is raised by the acidity of the molasses, so do not swap in honey or a light syrup. Fill the greased mold two-thirds full, cover it tightly, and steam 2 1/2 hours over gently simmering water, topping up the pot as it boils away.
- YieldEverything here is built for two, so the puddings run to two individual molds or one small 3-cup dish. Sabayon does not keep and should be made while the pudding bakes.
Cooking for Two belongs to the Boston Cooking School tradition of the early 1900s, when domestic-science writers began producing books for small households rather than the large families and staffed kitchens their predecessors assumed. The sweet course here is frankly Continental in its borrowings: sabayon is the French spelling of the Italian zabaglione, a whipped egg-and-wine foam that American cooks adapted to citrus juice, and "Viennoise" attached to a caramel bread pudding signals the prestige of Viennese pastry in period menus rather than any particular Austrian original. Against these sit the plainer New England items, the blueberry Betty and the steamed graham pudding. "Betty" for a baked bread-and-fruit pudding is recorded in American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century and its origin is not documented; graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the antebellum dietary reformer who preached unbolted wheat, and by 1900 it had shed most of its moral freight and become simply a wholesome, slightly nutty flour for steamed puddings and gems.