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Sauce, A Good (for Various Boiled Puddings)
INGREDIENTS for sauce for large pudding.- 1/4 lb. of butter, 1/4 lb. of pounded sugar, a wineglassful of brandy or rum. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Beat the butter to a cream, until no lumps remain; add the pounded sugar and brandy or rum; stir once or twice until the whole is thoroughly mixed, and serve. This sauce may either be poured round the pudding or served in a tureen, according to taste or fancy.
SAUCE, SOYER'S.
Sauce, Soyer's (for Plum Pudding). -INGREDIENTS for sauce for good-sized pudding. The yolks of 3 eggs, 1 tablespoonful of powdered sugar, 1 gill of milk, a very little grated lemon-rind, 2 small wineglassfuls of brandy. AVERAGE COST, 1s. Separate the yolks from the whites of 3 eggs, and put the former into a stewpan; add the sugar, milk and grated lemon-rind, and stir over the fire until the mixture thickens; but do not allow it to boil.
Put in the brandy; let the sauce stand by the side of the fire to get quite hot; keep stirring it, and serve in a boat or tureen separately, or pour it over the pudding.
TIME. Altogether, 10 minutes.
Two pudding sauces run together on one page: a brandy butter (what we now call hard sauce) and Soyer's warm brandy custard. Both are short on detail in the way Victorian sauce recipes usually are.
- The missing fractionsThe first recipe reads "lb. of butter, lb. of pounded sugar" because the fraction glyphs dropped out in printing. Beeton's hard sauce is conventionally equal weights of butter and sugar; a quarter-pound of each (about 115 g) with a wineglass of spirit is a sensible reading, but the original quantity is genuinely lost here.
- Wineglass and gillA Victorian wineglassful is about 2 fl oz (60 ml), so Soyer's "2 small wineglassfuls" of brandy is roughly 3 fl oz. A British gill is 5 fl oz (150 ml), not the American half-cup.
- Pounded sugarSugar came in loaves and was pounded and sieved at home; the modern equivalent is caster sugar. For the hard sauce, icing sugar beats in more smoothly and will not feel gritty on the tongue.
- The hinge in Soyer's sauce"Do not allow it to boil" is the whole recipe. Three yolks in a gill of milk will thicken at about 175-180F (80C); past 185F they scramble. Cook it in a heavy pan over low heat, or in a bowl over simmering water if you would rather not watch it closely.
- Adding the brandyThe spirit goes in after thickening, then the sauce is held hot at the side of the fire. On a modern hob that means the lowest setting, or off the heat in a warm water bath, still stirring. Reheating it briskly will curdle what you have just made.
- StewpanA stewpan is simply a saucepan with straight sides; any small heavy-based pan does. For the butter sauce, "beat to a cream" is a job for a stand mixer or electric beaters, and the butter must be properly soft or the sugar will not dissolve.
- YieldNeither sauce is given a yield. A quarter-pound each of butter and sugar serves six to eight alongside a Christmas pudding; the custard comes to roughly 275 ml.
- The cost line8d and 1s are prices in pre-decimal pence and shillings, quoted in the original Victorian edition. They are of historical interest only.
Alexis Soyer was the most famous cook in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century: chef at the Reform Club, author of The Gastronomic Regenerator, inventor of a portable field stove, and the man who went to Crimea to reorganise army cooking. Beeton's habit of naming a sauce after him reflects how thoroughly he had become a household brand rather than any claim that this particular custard was his invention. The pairing on this page is instructive about Victorian pudding service: a boiled plum pudding could be sent to table with a cold, stiff brandy butter cut through by its own richness, or with a hot egg-thickened sauce, and the two were understood as alternatives for the same dish. Hard sauce of butter, sugar and spirit is the simpler of the pair, and survives essentially unchanged as the brandy butter sold beside Christmas puddings today.