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Sauce for Boiled Pastry
Stew for fifteen minutes one pint of water, half a pound of sugar, and a piece of butter as large as an egg. Beat the yolks of three eggs. Remove the pan from the fire, and pour several spoonfuls of its contents into the beaten eggs, stirring briskly. Then pour all into the pan, place it over a slow fire and stir till it thickens. Season with lemon or vanilla.-Mrs. I.H.
A stirred sugar-and-egg sauce of the kind poured over boiled puddings and dumplings. The whole thing hinges on the tempering step, which the original describes correctly and briskly.
- Butter the size of an eggThe standard nineteenth-century shorthand for about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. It is a generous amount for a pint of liquid and gives the sauce its gloss.
- Half a pound of sugarThat is roughly 1 1/8 cups of granulated sugar by weight. The result is frankly sweet by current taste; two-thirds of that quantity still thickens properly, since the eggs and not the sugar do the setting.
- "Stew for fifteen minutes"This is a simmer, not a boil-down. The point is to dissolve the sugar completely and reduce the pint slightly; harder boiling will drive off enough water to leave a syrup that scrambles the eggs on contact.
- Tempering is the whole recipePouring several spoonfuls of hot syrup into the beaten yolks while stirring raises their temperature gradually. Reversing the order, or adding the syrup faster than the whisk can move, gives sweet scrambled egg, which straining will only partly disguise.
- "A slow fire"Low heat, and the pan off the flame at intervals if it runs ahead of you. The sauce thickens between about 170 and 180F and must never simmer again once the yolks are in; a double boiler removes the risk entirely.
- Judging thicknessIt will coat the back of a spoon and hold a line drawn through it with a finger. It is thinner hot than cold, so stop while it still looks slightly loose.
- SeasoningVanilla extract goes in off the heat, a teaspoon or so. For lemon, the grated zest can be steeped in the syrup during the fifteen minutes and strained out; juice added at the end will thin the sauce and may curdle it if the pan is still hot.
- YieldSomething over two cups, enough for a boiled pudding serving six to eight. It keeps a day covered in the refrigerator and is best rewarmed over hot water, not direct heat.
"Boiled pastry" here means the suet puddings, dumplings and roly-polys that were tied in a cloth and boiled for hours, a habit of English cookery carried into Virginia kitchens and still thoroughly at home in a book compiled in the 1870s. Such puddings are dense and dry-eating on their own, and household manuals of the period commonly carry a page or two of pouring sauces to go with them: hard sauce beaten from butter and sugar, plain sweetened cream, wine sauces, and stirred custards like this one. What Mrs. I.H. describes is essentially a lean crème anglaise built on sugar syrup rather than milk, which would have let a cook produce it from pantry staples when there was no fresh cream in the house. Housekeeping in Old Virginia was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, and the initialled attribution at the end of the recipe is the book's usual way of crediting them.