French Sauce
Cream half a pound butter, and stir in half a pound sugar. Then add the yolk of an egg, and a gill of wine. Put it on the fire; stir till it simmers. Grate nutmeg over it, after taking it off the fire.--Mrs. F.D.
A cooked pudding sauce in the hard-sauce family, made rich with a whole half-pound of butter and thickened only by an egg yolk. The hinge is heat control: the yolk sets well below the boil, so this wants the gentlest fire you can manage.
- Use a double boiler"Put it on the fire; stir till it simmers" is the one instruction to disobey slightly. Set the pan over barely simmering water and stir constantly until the sauce thickens and just steams; direct heat will scramble the single yolk into visible threads.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. The recipe does not say which wine; sherry, Madeira or a sweet white all suit.
- Weights to cupsHalf a pound of butter is two sticks, one cup. Half a pound of granulated sugar is a generous cup, about 1 1/8 cups; if you want the modern balance, err slightly under, since half a pound of sugar to half a pound of butter is very sweet by current taste.
- Cream, then temperCream the butter and sugar cold, as directed, then beat in the yolk before the wine goes in. Adding the wine last and in a thin stream keeps the emulsion from breaking.
- If it separatesButter-heavy sauces split easily. Pull the pan off the heat and whisk hard, or whisk in a spoonful of hot water; it will come back together as long as the yolk has not set.
- Nutmeg off the heatGrating the nutmeg after cooking is deliberate — the volatile oils are what you want, and they cook off fast. Grate whole nutmeg rather than using pre-ground.
- Yield and servingUpwards of two cups. Serve warm and pourable over plum pudding, boiled batter puddings, apple dumplings or plain cake; it firms considerably as it cools.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks used "French sauce" loosely, and in pudding-sauce chapters it often meant a wine sauce enriched with egg and butter rather than anything traceable to a French original. What is described here is close to a cooked version of hard sauce, the creamed butter-and-sugar paste spooned onto steamed and boiled puddings; adding a yolk and setting it over the fire turns the paste into something pourable. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1878, carries many recipes credited only by initials in this manner. Wine sauces of this kind appear in quantity in the period because a boiled or steamed pudding, cheap and filling, was improved largely by what was poured over it.