Grape Sauce
1 cup grape juice 1 tablespoon orange or lemon juice Boil all together until syrupy. Serve hot or cold. ½ cup butter 1 cup powdered sugar Hard Sauce No. I wine, brandy, or vanilla 1 teaspoon hot water Cream butter; add sugar by the teaspoon, and beat until light and creamy. Flavor and serve.
Hard Sauce No. 2 1 cup butter 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 cup powdered sugar 1 tablespoon brandy 1 cup beaten cream.
Cream butter; add sugar and cream alternately, flavoring, and serve very cold. cup butter 1 cup powdered sugar
Three dessert sauces run together here: a boiled grape syrup and two hard sauces. All are quick, and all depend more on technique than on precise measurement.
- The grape sauce as printedOne cup of grape juice with a tablespoon of citrus juice will reduce to a thin syrup on its own, and no sugar quantity appears in the ingredient list, though comparable fruit sauces are often sweetened. Treat the sweetening as a judgment call: taste the juice first and add sugar only if it needs it.
- Reducing to "syrupy"A cup of juice takes roughly 10-15 minutes at a steady simmer to fall by about half and coat a spoon. It thickens further as it cools, so pull it slightly looser than you want it.
- Grape juice then and nowBottled grape juice of this period was typically Concord, usually unsweetened or barely sweetened, and quite tart. Modern supermarket grape juice is often sweeter and sometimes blended, which will give a cloying sauce; unsweetened Concord juice is the closest match.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this era powdered sugar may mean a finely ground sugar rather than precisely what we now sell as confectioners' or icing sugar; for hard sauce, modern confectioners' sugar is the practical substitute and is what keeps the sauce smooth rather than gritty.
- Hard Sauce No. 1, the flavoring lineThe listing gives "wine, brandy, or vanilla" with no quantity. A teaspoon of vanilla or a tablespoon of spirits suits a half cup of butter; the teaspoon of hot water is there to loosen the mixture and help the sugar dissolve, not to flavor it.
- Adding sugar by the teaspoonThis is the hinge of both hard sauces. Sugar beaten in slowly stays suspended in the butter and gives a light, aerated sauce; dumped in at once it packs into a dense paste. Use a stand mixer on medium and give it several minutes.
- "1 cup beaten cream"Presumably whipped cream, added alternately with the sugar as directed. It turns No. 2 into a much lighter sauce, and the recipe's own instruction to serve it very cold matters, or it will slump.
- Yield and servingThe grape sauce reduces to roughly half a cup. The hard sauces differ in size: No. 1 makes about half the quantity of No. 2. No. 2 is directed to be served very cold; hard sauces of this kind are generally spooned onto a hot pudding so they melt at the table.
Hard sauce is a standard accompaniment to boiled and steamed puddings, chiefly under that name in America, where the English equivalent is usually brandy or rum butter; its name is often said to distinguish it from the pourable custards and "soft" sauces served alongside the same dishes, though this is a commonly repeated explanation rather than documented etymology. It is a stiff, chilled paste of creamed butter and sugar that softens against the hot pudding. American cookbooks of the early twentieth century often print two versions, a plain one and a richer one lightened with whipped cream, as here. The grape sauce belongs to a different tradition, the reduced fruit syrups that came into wide home use once commercially bottled unfermented grape juice was available; Concord grape juice was marketed heavily in the United States from the late nineteenth century onward, partly on temperance grounds, and it gave cooks a year-round fruit flavoring that needed nothing but boiling down.