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Wine Sauce
1 cup sugar. 1/4 cup butter.
Cream sugar and butter well. Put over hot water and add one-half cup sherry.
A hard-sauce-style dessert sauce, thinned and flavored over hot water rather than cooked. The whole thing depends on gentle heat: the sherry goes in off direct flame and the sauce is served warm, not simmered.
- Keep it under a simmer"Put over hot water" means a double boiler or a bowl set over a pan of water below the boil. If the butter gets hot enough to break, the sauce separates into greasy sugar syrup and cannot be brought back.
- Which sugarThe recipe says only "sugar," so granulated is the likely default. Confectioners' sugar creams smoother and dissolves more fully over the hot water, which gives a less gritty pourable sauce.
- The sherry is uncookedThe sherry is not cooked down -- half a cup stirred in over hot water rather than boiled retains much of its alcohol and its perfume. Use a drinkable medium or cream sherry, not "cooking sherry," which is salted. The finished sauce is noticeably alcoholic and is not a children's dessert.
- ConsistencyAs written this is thin and glossy, closer to a syrup than to a butter sauce. If it looks too loose, cool it briefly and whisk; if you want it thicker, cut the sherry to a third of a cup.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter, enough for six to eight servings spooned over pudding, gingerbread, steamed fruit pudding or apple dumplings.
- Holding and reheatingIt will firm up in the refrigerator and can be rewarmed over hot water, stirring. Do not microwave it; localized boiling splits the emulsion.
Wine sauce belongs to the family of sweet butter sauces that dressed boiled and steamed puddings in British and American cooking, the same tribe as hard sauce, brandy butter and lemon sauce. The technique is much the same in each case: sugar creamed into butter, then loosened with spirit, wine or hot water, so a cook could produce a sauce without a roux, a custard or a thermometer. National Prohibition took effect in the United States in January 1920, which would have made directions calling for half a cup of sherry awkward for later American editions.