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Sterling Sauce
1/2 cup butter 1 cup brown sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla or 2 tablespoons wine 4 tablespoons cream or milk Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and milk and flavoring drop by drop to prevent separation.
An uncooked creamed butter sauce of the hard-sauce family, meant to be spooned onto a hot steamed pudding so it melts into it. The whole success of it lies in adding the liquid slowly.
- The hinge: drop by dropButter holds only a little liquid in suspension. If the cream or wine goes in faster than the mixture can absorb it, the sauce breaks into greasy specks. Add a few drops, beat until smooth, then add a few more; the finished sauce should look like thick frosting.
- Butter temperatureCool room temperature, around 65F, is right. Butter that has gone soft and shiny will not hold the liquid at all, and butter straight from the refrigerator will not cream with the sugar.
- Brown sugarUse light or dark brown sugar, packed. It will not dissolve fully in a cold sauce, so the finished result has a faint grain to it; that is normal and disappears the moment it hits a hot pudding. Beating for a full three or four minutes reduces it.
- Wine versionTwo tablespoons of wine here most likely means a fortified wine, sherry, Madeira or port, rather than a table wine, though the recipe does not say. Because wine is thinner than cream, add it even more cautiously, and expect a slightly softer sauce.
- Quantities1/2 cup butter is one stick, 4 oz. Four tablespoons of cream is 1/4 cup. The original reads as either-or on the flavoring, vanilla or wine, while the 4 tablespoons of cream or milk is constant.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups, enough for six to eight servings of steamed or baked pudding. Serve cold or barely cool over a hot pudding so the contrast does the work.
- KeepingRefrigerate up to a week, covered. Let it come back to cool room temperature and beat it briefly before serving; it sets very firm when chilled.
Sauces like this one belong to the tradition of raw creamed butter and sugar, flavored with spirits or vanilla, set against a hot boiled or steamed pudding. 'Hard sauce' is the usual American term for it; the brandy butter still served with Christmas pudding is the same idea under a British name. The name hard sauce is generally explained as referring to its firm, unmelted state at the table, though that reading is traditional rather than documented. American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried whole sections of pudding sauces, and fanciful names for near-identical mixtures were common in these chapters, so a 'Sterling' sauce sits alongside foamy, creamy, and hard sauces that differ mainly in whether the butter is beaten with egg, cooked, or left raw as it is here.