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Wine or Brandy Sauce (for Puddings)
INGREDIENTS for sauce for pudding for 7 or 8 persons.-1 pint of melted butter, 3 heaped teaspoonfuls of pounded sugar, 1 large wineglassful of port or sherry, or of a small glassful of brandy. AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Make 1/2 pint of melted butter, omitting the salt; then stir in the sugar and wine or spirit in the above proportion, and bring the sauce to the point of boiling. Serve in a boat or tureen separately, and, if liked, WINE CASK. pour a little of it over the pudding. To convert this into punch sauce, add to the sherry or brandy a small wineglassful of rum and the juice and grated rind of 1/2 lemon. Liqueurs, such as Maraschino or Curaçoa, substituted for the brandy, make excellent sauces.
TIME. Altogether, 15 minutes.
The whole recipe hinges on one phrase that no longer means what it says: in Victorian English, "melted butter" is a cooked flour-and-butter sauce, not a pan of butter reduced to liquid. Read it as such and the rest falls into place.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceMrs Beeton's melted butter is butter cooked with a little flour and let down with water, simmered until smooth and glossy — what a modern cook would call a plain butter sauce or thin white sauce made on water rather than milk. The instruction here to omit the salt confirms that a compounded sauce, not liquefied butter, is meant. Simply melting butter and stirring in wine gives a broken, greasy result.
- The quantity contradicts itselfThe ingredient list calls for 1 pint of melted butter for seven or eight people; the method says to make half a pint. Half a pint (a scant 300 ml) of base sauce plus the wine is about right for eight modest servings, so follow the method and treat the pint as a slip.
- Glass measuresA wineglassful is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz (60 ml), and a small glass at rather less, perhaps 1 fl oz (30 ml), though the book does not define either. Brandy is specified in the smaller measure, presumably because it is stronger.
- Pounded sugarPounded sugar is loaf sugar crushed fine — caster sugar is the direct equivalent. Three heaped teaspoons is around 20 g, which reads sweet against half a pint of sauce but is balanced by the fortified wine.
- "The point of boiling" is literalBring it just to a shiver and take it off. A flour-thickened sauce held at a rolling boil after the wine goes in will thin, and much of the aroma of the port or brandy will go up with the steam.
- Punch sauce and liqueur variantsThe rum, lemon juice and grated rind are best added off the direct heat for the same reason, though the recipe does not say so. Maraschino and curaçao are both still made; the smaller measure given for brandy suits them, as they are sweeter than sherry and will otherwise dominate.
- ServingA sauce boat kept warm in a pan of hot water is a practical way to handle it, since a flour-thickened sauce of this kind skins as it cools. Half a pint works out at roughly 2 tablespoons a person over a steamed or Christmas pudding.
- Stray text in the original"WINE CASK" and the "AVERAGE COST, 9d." belong to the page's illustration caption and price note, not to the instructions.
Wine sauce belongs to the long English tradition of serving boiled and steamed puddings with something alcoholic and warm, and its base — the flour-thickened "melted butter" that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cooks used under everything from asparagus to plum pudding — was so standard that Beeton gives it its own numbered recipe and simply cross-refers to it. The variants show the drinks cupboard of a mid-Victorian household with money: port and sherry as everyday cooking wines, rum for punch flavour, and maraschino and curaçao as the fashionable imported liqueurs of the period. The ninepence average cost is characteristic of the book, which was written for households running to a budget and a servant or two, and which priced nearly every dish so a mistress could check her accounts. Brandy sauce and its close cousin brandy butter remain the standard accompaniment to Christmas pudding in Britain.