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Pudding Sauce (C sweet cream C boiling water)
1/2 C sweet cream 1/2 C boiling water 1 t vanilla Nutmeg Cook until thick.
Mrs. R. F. Wright.
Four lines from a church cookbook, written for someone who already knew what a pudding sauce was supposed to look like. As printed it is incomplete, and the gaps are worth naming before you start.
- The abbreviationsC is a cup, t a teaspoon. So half a cup of cream, half a cup of boiling water, one teaspoon vanilla, and nutmeg to taste.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" here means fresh, not sugared. Recipes of the period routinely specified which they wanted, since soured cream was also a normal kitchen ingredient. Any modern heavy or whipping cream is sweet cream.
- No sugar is listedA pudding sauce would normally be sweetened, and nothing in the four lines does that. Whether the sugar was dropped in typesetting or simply taken for granted by the contributor cannot be known; the quantity is unrecoverable, so any amount you add is your own.
- "Cook until thick" will not happen"Cook until thick" needs help -- Half a cup of cream diluted with an equal volume of boiling water has neither starch nor egg to set it. It will thicken only by reducing, which takes a long time and costs most of the yield. A thickener — a tablespoon of flour or cornstarch, or an egg yolk — is absent from the printed text.
- Vanilla goes in lastWhatever the intended body, add the vanilla off the heat. Held at a simmer, its aroma cooks off, which is why period recipes that thicken over a long boil taste flatter than they should.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the finished sauce rather than boiling it in. Ground nutmeg was sold commercially in this period, but the whole nut was also in common domestic use and is far more fragrant.
- YieldAbout a cup, which sauces four to six servings of a steamed or baked pudding. If you want a working recipe, use a current cream sauce or hard sauce and take the vanilla-and-nutmeg flavoring from this one.
Church and charitable cookbooks like this one were assembled by soliciting a favorite recipe from each member of the congregation, printing it under her married name, and selling the result to raise money for the building fund or the missionary society. The format explains both the charm and the unreliability: nothing was tested, nothing was standardized, and an ingredient as basic as sugar could go unmentioned. Pudding sauces themselves were a fixture of the American table well into the twentieth century, when a boiled or steamed pudding often closed a substantial dinner and needed something poured over it — simply a thin sweetened liquid flavored with vanilla, lemon or nutmeg. Vanilla extract and grated nutmeg were the two flavorings almost any pantry could be counted on to have.