Home › Desserts › Creamy Sauce
Creamy Sauce
+ cup butter + cup powdered sugar 2 tablespoons cream 2 tablespoons wine Mix butter and sugar until creamy, add wine and cream.
Cook over hot water until liquefied.
A creamed butter sauce for steamed and boiled puddings, warmed only until it pours. The whole technique is in the last line: gentle heat, never direct.
- Butter and sugar quantitiesThe figures for butter and powdered sugar have not survived legibly in this copy. Sauces of this type are commonly made with roughly one part butter to two parts sifted powdered sugar by volume, and the ratio is forgiving; adjust to taste rather than guessing at a lost number.
- Powdered sugarTake this as a finely ground sugar; the nearest modern equivalent is confectioners' or icing sugar, though period 'powdered' sugar could be a somewhat coarser grade. Sift it before creaming or the sauce will be gritty.
- WineThe recipe does not specify; a fortified or sweet wine such as sherry, Madeira or Marsala suits this kind of sauce. Two tablespoons is enough to flavour but not enough to thin the sauce, and it is barely cooked, so use something you would drink.
- Cook over hot waterA bain-marie, not a pan on the burner. Water hot but not boiling, and the bowl off the water's surface. Direct heat splits the emulsion and you get an oily puddle with sugar at the bottom.
- Stop at liquefiedThe sauce is done the moment it flows smoothly and looks glossy. Held longer or taken warmer it separates.
- If it does separateTake it off the heat and beat in a teaspoon of cold cream to bring it back together.
Sauces of creamed butter, sugar and wine belong to the long English tradition of hard sauce served over steamed and boiled puddings, where the fat melts into the hot pudding as it is eaten. Lowney's book, published by a Boston chocolate company early in the twentieth century, carries a full dessert chapter of exactly this kind of standard American household cookery alongside its cocoa and chocolate recipes. The distinction between a "hard" sauce left cold and stiff and a "creamy" one warmed until it pours is the only real difference here; the ingredients are the same.