Home › Cookery › Pudding Sauce (One cupful cream)
Pudding Sauce (One cupful cream)
One cupful cream, from morning's milk; two cupfuls sugar; one egg, well beaten; one tablespoonful butter; one teaspoonful corn-starch. Boil all together till a thick syrup. Take off the fire and add grated nutmeg and a glass of wine.-Mrs. S.T.
A hard-boiled sweet sauce of the kind poured over steamed and boiled puddings. Two points decide whether it works: the sugar-to-cream ratio is very high, and the egg has to be handled so it thickens rather than scrambles.
- Temper the eggThe hinge of the recipe. Beat the egg with the cornstarch and a little of the cream, then stir it into the warm remainder rather than dropping it into a boiling pan. Cooked over direct heat without tempering, it will set in threads before the syrup thickens.
- "Cream, from morning's milk"Hand-skimmed farm cream, skimmed off the pan rather than bought: richer than table milk, but its fat content varied. Heavy or whipping cream is the nearest modern equivalent; half-and-half will give a thinner sauce more prone to breaking.
- "A glass of wine"A wineglass in nineteenth-century American receipts is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup, though the measure was not standardised. Sherry or Madeira would suit. Add it off the heat as directed so the aroma is not driven off.
- The sugarTwo cups of sugar to one of cream gives a genuinely candy-sweet syrup by modern taste. Halving the sugar gives a less sweet sauce, though it will be looser and may need a little extra cornstarch.
- "Boil till a thick syrup"The receipt gives no time; a few minutes at a gentle boil, stirring, judging thickness by eye. Sustained hard boiling with this much sugar pushes the mixture toward caramel and can make it grainy as it cools.
- NutmegGrate it whole and fresh at the moment of adding. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its volatile oil within months, and here it is the only spice carrying the dish.
- Yield and servingThe receipt gives no yield; expect roughly two cups once the sugar has dissolved and the wine is added. Serve warm over a steamed suet, plum or cottage pudding; it thickens considerably on cooling and can be loosened with a spoonful of cream over low heat.
Boiled sugar-and-cream sauces spiked with wine and nutmeg are the workaday cousins of hard sauce, and they turn up in Southern household books because so many winter desserts were boiled or steamed puddings that arrived at the table plain and needed something poured over them. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, prints them with each receipt credited to its donor by initials, as here with Mrs. S.T. The instruction to use cream "from morning's milk" is a reminder that these were dairy households rather than shopping households: cream was what had risen on the pans overnight, and its richness varied with the cow and the season.