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Wine Sauce No. 1
1 pint white sugar ¼ pound (scant) butter 1 glass wine 1 nutmeg 1 tablespoon warm water.
Beat steadily for ½ hour. Put saucepan on fire with about a gill of water in it. When it boils, put in sugar, etc., but do not stir or let boil. all is dissolved. get cold.
Let simmer gently until Pour into tureen and let
The text as printed has had its lines scrambled by the typesetter or scanner: the instructions run out of order, and the sentence "When it boils, put in sugar, etc., but do not stir or let boil" clearly belongs before "all is dissolved" and "Let simmer gently until." Read as intended, it is a creamed sugar-and-butter sauce loosened over water and finished with wine.
- The order of operationsCream the sugar, butter, nutmeg and warm water together first, then add that mixture to the boiling water in the pan and let it simmer gently, without stirring, until dissolved.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. It is the amount of water that goes into the saucepan to start.
- A pint of sugarMeasured by volume, not weight: about 2 cups, roughly 14 oz. Nineteenth-century sauces of this kind are frankly sweet, and cutting the sugar to a cup and a half is defensible.
- A glass of wineUnderstood in period cookbooks as a wineglass, about 2 fluid ounces, though a larger glass was sometimes meant. Sherry, madeira or a sweet white were the usual choices for pudding sauce.
- One nutmegA whole grated nutmeg is around 2 to 3 teaspoons and will dominate everything. A teaspoon, freshly grated, gives the warmth intended without turning the sauce medicinal.
- "Beat steadily for half an hour"The recipe asks for half an hour of beating by hand. A stand mixer with the paddle will reach the same pale, aerated result in a small fraction of that time.
- Do not let it boilThe hinge of the recipe. A butter-and-sugar emulsion held at a bare simmer stays glossy; brought to a boil it breaks and the fat pools on top. Keep it below a shiver and resist stirring.
- Yield and servingRoughly eight to ten servings. The instruction to pour it into a tureen and let it get cold marks it as a sauce for steamed and boiled puddings, spooned cold onto hot pudding so it slackens on contact.
Pudding sauces occupy their own short chapter in many Anglo-Canadian cookbooks of the period because boiled and steamed puddings were a standard winter dessert, and a plain suet or bread pudding lives or dies by what is poured over it. The wine sauce is among the dressiest of the family — hard sauce with the butter and sugar melted rather than left stiff — and versions appear in English household manuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before crossing into North American books. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and its recipes were drawn from Canadian housewives, which may account for the compressed, assumed-knowledge phrasing here.