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Rich Sauce for Puddings
One pint cream; half pound sugar; one tablespoonful butter; one glass of wine. Season to the taste. Do not let it boil.-Miss E.P.
A pouring sauce for boiled and steamed puddings, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what it should look like. Two things carry it: the ratio of sugar to cream, and the instruction not to boil.
- Do not let it boilWine is acidic and cream at a rolling boil with acid present will curdle into grains and whey. Warm the cream, sugar and butter over low heat only until the sugar dissolves and the mixture steams, then take it off the heat before the wine goes in.
- Half a pound of sugarThat is 8 oz by weight, roughly 1 1/8 cups granulated. It is a genuinely sweet sauce, better suited to a plain suet or batter pudding than to an already-sugary dessert; scaling it back to 5 or 6 oz is defensible.
- "One glass of wine"A wine glass in nineteenth-century American receipts is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup, not a modern 6 oz pour. The receipt does not say which wine; Madeira or sherry would have been likely in a Virginia household, and brandy was another common choice.
- A pint of cream16 fl oz of heavy cream. Nothing in the period text calls for whipping it, so this is a warm pouring sauce, not a foam.
- "Season to the taste"In a sweet sauce this most likely points to spice rather than salt. Grated nutmeg is the commonest choice in wine sauces of this period; mace, a strip of lemon peel steeped and removed, or a little vanilla all work. A pinch of salt does sharpen the sweetness.
- One tablespoonful butterA small amount for the volume, added for gloss rather than body. The sauce will stay thin and pourable throughout; it does not set or thicken on cooling the way a cornstarch sauce does.
- Yield and servingRoughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups, enough for eight to ten servings ladled over a pudding. Serve warm; reheat gently and never above a bare simmer, or the same curdling problem returns.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathered contributions from what its title page called "two hundred and fifty of Virginia's noted housewives," which is why so many receipts close with a set of initials rather than a name. Sauces like this one belong to the long British tradition of wine sauce for boiled puddings, carried into the American South and reinforced there by the Madeira trade, which made fortified wine a normal pantry item in well-off Virginia households well into the nineteenth century. The extreme brevity is typical of the genre: the compiler assumed a reader who had made a dozen pudding sauces already and needed only the proportions and the one warning that mattered.