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Cream Sherry Sauce
3 tablespoons butter cup sugar 2 egg yolks cup cream 3 tablespoons sherry few grains salt Mix butter, sugar, yolks and cream; cook in double boiler until mixture thickens; add wine, and serve. 1 cup sugar
A stirred custard sauce in the older style, thickened with yolks alone and finished with sherry off the heat. It is essentially a sabayon-adjacent pouring sauce for puddings, and the whole job is temperature control.
- The hinge: never let it boilA double boiler is specified because yolks curdle above roughly 180F. Keep the water at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, and keep the bowl clear of the water. The sauce is done when it coats a spoon and holds a drawn line, about 170-175F.
- Quantities as printedThe sugar and cream measures have lost their fractions in this printing and cannot be reconstructed with confidence; a stray '1 cup sugar' also trails the text and may or may not belong to this recipe. Half a cup of each against two yolks and three tablespoons of butter is a reasonable working guess; scale to taste and expect a pourable, not spoonable, consistency.
- Add the wine off the heatSherry stirred in while the pan is still on the stove will drive off the aroma the sauce is named for, and the added acid can encourage the yolks to tighten. Pull the pan, then stir it in.
- The butterCutting it in cold, a piece at a time, at the end gives a glossier sauce than melting it with the yolks at the start. Either order works, but do not let the butter break the emulsion by adding it all at once to a hot mixture.
- Sherry to use'Sherry' in an American kitchen of this period could mean anything from dry to sweet, and sweeter cream and medium styles were widely sold. A dry fino will read thin and sharp against this much sugar; a cream or medium sherry suits it better. Avoid supermarket 'cooking sherry,' which is salted.
- If it curdlesA sauce that has just begun to grain can often be pulled back by straining it immediately into a cold bowl and whisking hard. Once it has scrambled outright it will not recover.
- Yield and servingRoughly a cup, depending on how the missing measures are read; enough for four to six servings over steamed pudding, plain cake, baked apples or a cabinet pudding. It can be served warm or chilled; chilled, it thickens noticeably. Keep leftovers refrigerated and use within two days.
Wine sauces for puddings were a fixture of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American dessert cookery, sitting alongside hard sauce and plain vanilla sauce as the standard finish for anything steamed, boiled or baked plain. It resembles English wine custards and, more distantly, zabaglione, though here the yolks are enriched with cream and butter rather than whipped over heat to a foam. The Walter M. Lowney Company was a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and its cookbooks, like those issued by Baker's and other makers, folded a broad general dessert repertoire around the recipes meant to sell the company's cocoa and chocolate.