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Brandy Sauce for Plum Pudding
Making the rich transparent sauce as above directed and add to it after straining, 1/2 pint of brandy and do not boil afterwards. If to be set on fire when the pudding is sent in another half pint of brandy is required. Make it hot and pour it on top of the other sauce without mixing, then set on fire with a pine splinter.
A two-part finish for a Christmas pudding: a clear sweet sauce enriched with brandy, and a second float of heated brandy set alight at the table. The book assumes you have already made its "rich transparent sauce" earlier in the same section — essentially a sugar syrup thickened lightly with arrowroot or cornstarch, enriched with butter, then strained.
- The hingeDo not boil after the brandy goes in. Once the sauce simmers, the alcohol and most of the brandy aroma leave with the steam and you are left with sweetened water. Stir the spirit into the strained sauce off the heat.
- Half a pintAn American pint is 2 cups, so half a pint of brandy is 1 cup. The recipe gives no yield, but this is a large quantity of spirit for a sauce; halving it will give a milder result.
- The second half pintThe flaming brandy is separate and additional. The recipe's 'make it hot' is the operative instruction: cold spirit is difficult to light, while warm brandy catches readily. Do not let it boil either, or there will be little left to burn.
- Without mixingThe point of pouring the hot brandy gently over the surface is to keep a thin unmixed layer of nearly neat spirit on top, where the vapour can ignite. Pour down the side of a spoon held against the sauce.
- Pine splinterA splinter of resinous pine was the household long match. A long fireplace match or a taper does the same job; a short match brings your fingers too close to the flash.
- Flaming safelyA cup of burning brandy is a real flame, not a decorative one. Light it away from anything overhead, never pour spirit from the bottle toward a lit dish, and keep a pan lid within reach to smother it. The flame is nearly invisible in a bright room, so dim the lights before lighting rather than after.
History: Brandy applied to plum pudding in two forms — folded into the sauce and burnt over the top — is a familiar nineteenth-century Christmas practice, and the flaming pudding is memorably described by Dickens, whose Cratchit pudding in A Christmas Carol (1843) arrives "blazing in half of half a quartern of ignited brandy." The "rich transparent sauce" this recipe builds on belongs to a family of clear starch-thickened sweet sauces flavoured with brandy, rum, sherry or lemon; the opaque butter-and-sugar version now called hard sauce was the other common accompaniment.