Brandy Sauce
Cream together one-quarter pound fresh butter, and one quarter pound pulverized white sugar. Mix with it one gill of lemon brandy, or half the quantity of brandy; the juice of one lemon, and half a nutmeg grated. Stir it slowly into half a cup of boiling water, and after letting it simmer a moment, pour into a warm sauce tureen.-Miss E.P.
A warm brandy sauce for steamed and boiled puddings, essentially hard sauce loosened with a little boiling water. The whole thing succeeds or fails on temperature control.
- Do not let it boilThis is a butter emulsion, not a cooked custard or syrup. Add the boiling water in a thin stream while stirring, keep it barely below a simmer for a few seconds only, and take it off. Sustained boiling will split the butter out into a greasy pool with sweet liquid underneath.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. So a full half cup of lemon brandy, or 1/4 cup of plain brandy. That is a generous amount of alcohol; it is not cooked off in a moment's simmer, and the sauce will taste strongly of it.
- Quarter pound each4 oz butter is one standard stick (1/2 cup). 4 oz pulverized sugar is roughly 1 cup, loosely packed. Pulverized sugar of the period was sugar crushed and sieved fine, sometimes broken down at home from a loaf and sometimes bought ready-ground; modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which will thicken the sauce very slightly. Superfine (caster) sugar is arguably the closer match, though it needs more creaming to dissolve.
- Lemon brandyA nineteenth-century pantry staple: brandy in which lemon peel has steeped, used as a flavoring extract. It is not sold as such now. Steep the pared zest of two lemons in a cup of brandy for a week, or use plain brandy at the reduced quantity the recipe allows plus the zest of one lemon.
- Half a nutmegGrated, that is close to a rounded teaspoon of fresh nutmeg. It is assertive. Half that amount suits most modern palates, and pre-ground nutmeg from a jar is not a substitute worth making here.
- Yield and servingAppreciably more than a cup; the quantities as given come to nearer two. Warming the tureen is not decorative fussiness: poured into a cold vessel the sauce chills, thickens and separates before it reaches the table.
- If it breaksOff the heat, whisk in a tablespoon of very hot water; the emulsion will usually come back together. Cold water will not do it.
Brandy sauce belongs to the family of pudding sauces that arrived in American kitchens with the English boiled and steamed pudding, and it appears in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877) among a long run of dessert sauces because no Christmas or company pudding would have been sent to table naked. The uncooked version of the same mixture, butter creamed with sugar and spirit, is what English cooks call hard sauce or brandy butter; here it is thinned with boiling water into something pourable. The recipe's signature, Miss E. P., reflects how Marion Cabell Tyree assembled the volume: she collected contributions from some 250 ladies of "Virginia and her sister states," as the book's subtitle has it, and credited them, often by initials only, so that the book reads as a record of what particular households actually made rather than a single author's prescription. Lemon brandy, called for here as though it needed no explanation, was a homemade flavoring extract kept on hand in an era when commercial bottled essences were expensive and, it was often said, liable to adulteration.