Home › Pudding Sauces › Hard Sauce
Hard Sauce
1 cup sugar (fruit sugar) Cream together and flavor to taste.
Keep cold.
The entry as printed has lost a line: hard sauce is butter creamed with sugar, and only the sugar survives in this copy. The instruction "cream together" is the giveaway that a fat was named above it.
- The missing ingredientButter. Period recipes for hard sauce commonly run about 1/2 cup butter to 1 cup sugar, creamed until pale and light; some versions use closer to equal volumes for a firmer, less sweet sauce.
- Fruit sugarIn Canadian usage of the era this means a very fine granulated sugar, close to what is sold now as caster or superfine. It matters here because the sauce is never heated, and coarse sugar stays gritty on the tongue.
- Flavor to tasteThe usual choices were brandy, sherry, rum, vanilla, or a little grated nutmeg. Liquid flavorings go in a teaspoon at a time and must be beaten in fully, or the sauce breaks and weeps.
- Butter temperatureThe butter should be soft enough to take the sugar but not oily. Creaming warm butter gives a sauce that will not set firm in the cold.
- Keep coldThe whole point of the name: the sauce is served firm and melts against a hot steamed pudding. Chill at least an hour, and either mound it in a dish or press it flat and cut it into rounds or squares.
- YieldButter and one cup of sugar make roughly a cup and a half of sauce, enough to serve a family alongside a plum or cottage pudding, depending on how generously it is spooned out.
Hard sauce takes its name from its texture rather than its strength: it is the cold, solid counterpart to the poured "soft" sauces of custard or wine. It belongs to the British steamed-pudding tradition, where a spoonful set on a hot plum pudding melts into it, and the brandy-flavored version is still known in Britain as brandy butter. Canadian and American books of the early twentieth century, this one included, print it as a matter of course. Its survival in modern kitchens is almost entirely seasonal, tied to Christmas pudding and mincemeat pies.