Hard Sauce
1/3 cup butter 1 cup powdered sugar 1/2 teaspoon flavoring extract Cream butter until very light; add sugar very slowly, beating until light and creamy. Add flavoring and beat again.
A three-ingredient creamed sauce that depends entirely on how much air you beat into the butter. The whole recipe takes five minutes with a mixer.
- The hinge: temperature of the butterThe butter must be soft enough to cream but still cool, around 65F. If it is warm or greasy the sugar will not aerate and the sauce turns dense and oily rather than light.
- Powdered sugar then and nowModern confectioners' sugar contains about 3 percent cornstarch; the period product may not have. It works well here; sift it if it is lumpy, since the lumps will not dissolve in an uncooked sauce.
- Add the sugar slowly, as writtenDumping in the full cup at once collapses the creamed butter. Add it a spoonful or two at a time with the beater running, which is why the original says "very slowly."
- Flavoring extractVanilla is the default reading, but lemon, almond or a tablespoon of brandy or rum in place of the extract were all standard. Liquid additions should go in a little at a time or the sauce will break.
- SaltButter of the period was commonly salted. With unsalted butter, a small pinch of salt keeps the cup of sugar from tasting flat.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup, enough for six to eight servings. Chill until firm, then serve cold in a mound or in pats on hot pudding, gingerbread or fried cakes so it melts as it goes to the table.
- KeepingRefrigerate, covered, up to a week; it takes on other flavors from the refrigerator quickly. Let it stand a few minutes before serving so it slices rather than shatters.
Hard sauce is the cold, uncooked counterpart to the warm pudding sauces of British and American cookery; the name is usually explained as distinguishing it from those liquid sauces, since it sets hard when chilled. Its most familiar form is brandy butter, still eaten with Christmas pudding and mince pie in Britain, and American cookbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried it under names like Sterling sauce and Vanilla hard sauce for use on steamed puddings, apple dumplings and gingerbread.