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Butter and Sugar Sauce
HARD SAUCE. 1 pound of powdered sugar. 1/2 pound of best butter. Nutmeg. Warm the butter and sugar sufflciently to mix well. Beat them together till perfectly white. Grate nutmeg over the smooth top. A favorite kind of sauce for any plain pudding.
A two-ingredient creamed butter sauce, served cold in a mound beside a hot pudding. The whole thing hinges on temperature control.
- Ratio and quantity1 lb powdered sugar to 1/2 lb butter is roughly 3 3/4 cups sugar to 2 sticks. That yields well over two cups of sauce, enough for a large pudding serving 10 to 12; halve or quarter it for a household batch.
- "Warm sufficiently" means barelyThe butter should be soft enough to take the sugar, around 65F, rather than genuinely melted. If it starts to melt the mixture tends to go grainy and slick instead of whipping pale, and it may not recover with further beating.
- Powdered sugar, not granulatedNineteenth-century powdered sugar was loaf sugar crushed and sieved, closer to today's superfine than to confectioners' sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar works and dissolves faster, though its cornstarch gives a slightly softer set; superfine granulated gives a cleaner flavor.
- "Best butter"An instruction with force in a period when butter was often rancid or heavily salted. Use unsalted, good quality, since nothing here masks it. A pinch of salt is worth adding if you use unsalted.
- Beat until whiteThat is the doneness test, and it takes five to eight minutes in a stand mixer with the paddle. The volume increase is what makes hard sauce light rather than a lump of sweet butter.
- Setting and servingChill until firm; the name is usually explained by that firmness, in contrast to pouring sauces. The recipe's reference to a "smooth top" suggests it was smoothed in a dish or mould before the nutmeg was grated over it.
- NutmegGrate it whole; pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its volatile oil within months. Roughly 1/2 teaspoon over a full batch.
Hard sauce is the standard English accompaniment to boiled and steamed puddings, and it appears in American books throughout the nineteenth century under a shifting set of names: butter and sugar sauce, plain hard sauce, and, when brandy goes in, brandy butter. The point of it is textural contrast. A hot pudding melts the chilled mound into a sauce at the table, so the cook gets both a sauce and something that will keep for days in a cold larder without curdling, which no egg or cream sauce would do. That keeping quality also means it can be made in quantity ahead of service. The version with flavoring is often traced to English Christmas pudding custom, but the plain butter-and-sugar form given here is the one offered, as the recipe says, for any plain pudding.