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Cream Brandy Sauce
1 cup water 3 egg yolks 2 tablespoons brandy 1 cup sugar + cup cream few orange rind gratings few grains salt Cook sugar and water ten minutes; beat yolks; add cream, brandy, salt, orange rind gratings. Add sugar and water slowly and beat until mixture thickens.
A pouring sauce built like a pâte à bombe: hot sugar syrup beaten into yolks. The whole thing succeeds or fails on how you combine them.
- The hinge: add the syrup in a thin streamBeat constantly and pour the hot syrup down the side of the bowl in a slow trickle. Dumped in at once it scrambles the yolks and no amount of beating will smooth them out.
- "+ cup cream" is a broken fractionThe character is lost, and the original most likely read ¼ or ½ cup. Half a cup gives a pourable sauce with this quantity of syrup.
- Ten minutes of boiling is a stage, not a timeOne cup sugar to one cup water cooked for ten minutes will reach the thread stage or beyond, somewhere upward of 230°F. Use a thermometer rather than the clock, since pan width and heat change the timing considerably.
- Egg safetyThe syrup alone is hot enough to be sterile, but once it meets cold cream and yolks the mixture may settle well below 160°F. If that matters to you, beat the sauce in a bowl over simmering water until it reaches 160°F, or use pasteurized eggs.
- Brandy goes in coldIt is added with the cream before the syrup, so most of the alcohol stays in the finished sauce. Two tablespoons is assertive; scale down if the sauce accompanies something already spirited.
- Orange rind"few gratings" means a small quantity of zest, coloured part only. Use an untreated orange.
- Yield and servingSomething over a pint. It is a warm or barely cool sauce for steamed and boiled puddings; beat it briefly again before serving if it has stood.
- StorageIt does not keep well; the foam falls and the sauce weeps within a few hours. Make it the same day.
Brandy sauce belongs to the long English line of spirited puddings sauces that crossed to American tables with the steamed and boiled puddings of the Christmas table — hard sauce beaten cold with butter and sugar, and pouring sauces like this one, thickened with egg instead of flour. What distinguishes this version is its method: the hot-syrup-over-yolks technique is essentially the French base used for bombe glacée and for buttercreams, borrowed here for a dessert sauce. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like other company cookbooks of the era it surrounded its proprietary chocolate recipes with a full general repertoire, so that the volume reads as a household manual rather than an advertisement.