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Strawberry Sauce
1/3 cup butter 2/3 cup strawberries 1 cup powdered sugar White 1 egg Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, egg beaten until stiff, and strawberries. Beat until fruit is mashed.
Creamy Sauce I 1/4 cup butter 3/4 cup powdered sugar 2 tablespoons milk 2 tablespoons wine Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and milk and wine drop by drop. If liquids are added too fast the sauce will have a curdled appearance. Foamy Sauce I 1/2 cup butter 1 cup powdered sugar 1 egg 2 tablespoons wine Cream the butter, add gradually sugar, egg well beaten, and wine; beat while heating over hot water.
A trio of creamed-butter pudding sauces of the sort ladled over steamed and cottage puddings. Two of the three are built on egg that never reaches a safe temperature, so read the first point before anything else.
- The raw eggThe strawberry sauce folds in a stiffly beaten raw white and is served as-is, so it carries the usual raw-egg risk, particularly for children, elderly diners, anyone pregnant or immune-compromised. The foamy sauce is beaten over hot water, but no time or temperature is given, so there is no guarantee the egg reaches a safe temperature; take it to 160F on a thermometer, or work from a current recipe that addresses the egg.
- "Powdered sugar"In books of this vintage powdered sugar generally meant a finely ground sugar rather than the modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. The distinction matters for texture: the older product creams into butter with a slight grain.
- "Wine"Unspecified wine in a pudding sauce of this period was commonly a fortified one, sherry or Madeira, occasionally sweet Marsala, though the recipe does not say. Two tablespoons is flavouring, not liquid volume.
- Why the creamy sauce curdlesThe warning about adding liquids drop by drop is the whole technique. Creamed butter and sugar will only hold a small amount of milk or wine, and only if it goes in slowly enough to emulsify; poured in at once it splits, and it is hard to beat back together.
- Butter temperatureCreaming works at roughly 65F. Butter straight from the refrigerator will not take the sugar, and butter approaching melting will not hold air, which is the point of all three sauces.
- YieldBy the ingredient quantities each of these comes out at something over a cup, the strawberry and foamy sauces closer to two, enough to sauce six to eight servings of pudding.
Pudding sauces occupy their own chapter in many American cookbooks of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, because the puddings themselves were plain by design: steamed batters, cottage puddings, bread puddings, all cheap and all improved by something rich poured over them. The creamed butter-and-sugar family, of which hard sauce is the plainest member, let a household turn a few ounces of butter and a spoonful of sherry into the luxurious element of a meal. The strawberry version belongs to the early-summer window when berries were available and cheap. That three sauces of increasing richness sit side by side on the page, numbered as first of their kind, fits the domestic-science habit of teaching one method and then varying an ingredient at a time.