Hard Sauce
1/3 cup butter 2 tablespoons sherry or 1 cup powdered sugar 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg Cream the butter; add the sugar. Continue beating until smooth and creamy. Add flavoring, and stir again. Put on serving dish and place near ice.
A two-ingredient sauce with one variable, and the whole thing depends on temperature: soft butter to cream it, cold storage to set it.
- Read the columns, not the linesThe ingredients have run together, most likely from a two-column setting. Read as: 1/3 cup butter, 1 cup powdered sugar, and then a choice of flavoring: 2 tablespoons sherry or 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered sugar" meant sugar ground fine, closer to (though not always as fine as) what is now sold as confectioners' sugar. Modern versions contain cornstarch, which is harmless here but tastes chalky if underbeaten; sift it and beat a full two or three minutes.
- Butter temperatureButter must be at about 65F to cream properly. Too cold and the sugar will not incorporate; melted or greasy and the sauce will separate when it chills.
- Two tablespoons of sherry into a third of a cup of butterThat is a lot of liquid for the fat to take. Add it a teaspoon at a time, beating between additions, or the sauce will break. If it does curdle, more sifted sugar will usually bring it back.
- "Place near ice"Written for an icebox. Refrigerate it, covered, until firm — an hour is enough. Serve it cold and firm against a hot pudding; that contrast is the entire point of the sauce.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough for six to eight servings of steamed pudding, pie or baked apples. It keeps a week refrigerated and freezes well.
- Both flavorings, if you likeSherry and nutmeg are not mutually exclusive, and some period recipes pair a spirit with a grating of nutmeg. A pinch of salt sharpens the sweetness noticeably.
Hard sauce takes its name from its texture rather than its strength — it is the "hard" counterpart to the soft, pourable dessert sauces of the same era, and is generally traced to British Christmas cookery, where the brandy-flavored version is still called brandy butter. American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries printed it constantly as the standard accompaniment to steamed and boiled puddings, with sherry, brandy, rum, vanilla or nutmeg offered interchangeably as the flavoring.