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Sauce, Sweet (for Pudding)
INGREDIENTS for sauce for good-sized pudding. - pint of melted butter made with milk, 3 teaspoonfuls of pounded sugar, flavouring of grated lemon-rind or cinnamon. AVERAGE COST, 4d.
Make 1/2 pint of melted butter, omitting any salt; stir in the sugar, add a little grated lemon-rind, nutmeg or powdered cinnamon, and serve. Previously to making the melted butter, the milk can be flavoured with bitter almonds, by infusing about half a dozen of them in it for about hour; the milk should then be strained before it is added to the other ingredients. This simple sauce may be served for children, with batter, plum, or bread pudding.
TIME.-Altogether, 15 minutes.
A plain Victorian pudding sauce, but the optional flavouring is the reason this page carries a warning: bitter almonds are not a culinary ingredient in the modern sense, and the quantity called for here is not trivial.
- Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed or steeped in liquid. Half a dozen infused in milk is a real dose, and the sauce is described as suitable for children, who are the most vulnerable to it. Their sale as whole kernels is restricted or banned in many countries for exactly this reason.
- Not the same as almond extractCommercial almond extract and modern almond flavouring are made so that the toxic component is removed or absent. They are not a substitute for anything in this recipe, and this recipe should not be reconstructed around them; use a current pudding-sauce recipe instead.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian English melted butter means a thickened white sauce of butter, flour and liquid, here made with milk rather than water. A reader who simply melts butter has misread the whole entry.
- Pounded sugarPounded sugar is loaf sugar crushed fine — roughly what is now sold as caster sugar. Granulated sugar dissolves adequately in a hot sauce.
- A missing figure in the ingredient listThe method calls for half a pint of melted butter, and that is the amount to work from. The ingredient list still has no figure before "pint", so take the quantity from the method instead.
- Cost and period measuresThe book costs this sauce at fourpence. An imperial pint is 20 fl oz, not the American 16, wherever pints appear in Beeton.
Sweet variations on "melted butter" sauce fill the pudding chapters of nineteenth-century English cookery books: the same flour-and-butter base carried parsley or caper for meat and fish, and sugar with lemon-rind, nutmeg or cinnamon for the boiled and baked puddings that ended almost every dinner. Bitter almond was a fashionable flavouring of the period, prized for the marzipan-and-cherry note that comes from benzaldehyde, and it was sold openly by grocers and druggists alongside sweet almonds; the same compound in almond kernels, peach stones and laurel leaves was used freely in creams, custards and blancmanges. The danger was known — Victorian poisoning manuals discuss it — but the line between flavouring and hazard was drawn far more loosely than it is now, and this recipe gives no warning with the quantity it specifies.