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Hard Sauce
1/3 cup butter 1 cup powdered sugar 1/3 teaspoon lemon extract 2/3 teaspoon vanilla Cream the butter, add sugar gradually and flavoring. Serve cold.
A plain creamed butter sauce for hot steamed pudding, and one of the few sweet sauces that is better made in advance than at the last minute.
- Powdered sugarMost likely confectioners' sugar, though in older books the term was also used for finely ground granulated sugar. Coarse granulated sugar will not dissolve in cold butter and leaves the sauce gritty.
- Butter temperatureThe butter should be soft enough to take the sugar but not oily. If it warms too far the sauce can go greasy or separate; chilling and rebeating usually brings it back.
- SaltThe recipe adds none, and salted dairy butter was common at the time. With unsalted butter a pinch of salt keeps the sauce from reading as flatly sweet.
- Lemon extractA third of a teaspoon is a small amount, enough to sit behind the vanilla rather than be tasted on its own. Grated lemon zest can be used instead if the alcohol note of the extract is unwanted.
- YieldAbout a cup, enough for six to eight modest servings alongside plum pudding or a steamed fruit pudding.
- Serve cold, and whyThe point of hard sauce is the contrast: it should be firm enough to hold a shape and melt only on contact with the hot pudding. Mound or pipe it, chill until set, and take it from the refrigerator just before serving.
- KeepingCovered and refrigerated it holds a week; frozen, a month. Let it stand a few minutes before serving so it is cold but not brittle.
Hard sauce takes its name from its texture rather than its method -- it is the "hard" counterpart to the warm liquid pudding sauces thickened with cornstarch or egg that filled the same place on nineteenth-century menus. English versions are traditionally spiked with brandy or rum and go under the name brandy butter, still standard with Christmas pudding; extract-flavoured versions like this one were common in American household cooking once bottled lemon and vanilla extracts were widely available. Steamed holiday pudding was served through the turn-of-year season, not on Christmas Day alone.