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French Custard Sauce
1 pound of sugar. 6 ounces of fresh butter. 2 eggs. 1/2 pint of madeira or sherry. 1/2 teaspoonful of ground cinnamon.
Proceed at first as if making cake, to warm the butter and sugar, and cream them together with the cinnamon and the 2 eggs in a deep saucepan. Then set the mixture over the fire and while stirring it as it becomes warm pour in the wine a little at a time till all is in. With an egg-whisk then beat up the sauce till it becomes quite frothy and begins to thicken. It must not quite boil. Should be made only just before it is to be used.
Despite the name, there is no milk here: this is a wine sabayon thickened with egg and enriched with butter, meant to be spooned hot over pudding. Everything depends on holding it just below a simmer.
- The hinge: heat, not boilThe egg has to set enough to thicken but never coagulate into threads. Work over low direct heat with constant whisking, or over barely simmering water if you want insurance, and pull it the moment it holds a ribbon on the whisk.
- Temperature targetThickening happens somewhere around 160F to 180F (71-82C), and holding it near the upper end of that range also brings the egg to a safe temperature. A thermometer is steadier than the "quite frothy" cue, though the sugar and wine here push the curdling point higher than it would be for eggs alone.
- Weights into cupsA pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups granulated. Six ounces of butter is a stick and a half. A half pint of wine is one cup by US measure, a little over a cup if the book's pint is imperial.
- Sugar levelBy modern palates this is very sweet: a pound of sugar to two eggs. Cutting the sugar to 8-10 ounces gives a sauce that tastes of the wine rather than of syrup.
- The wineUse a dry or medium Madeira or an amontillado sherry rather than a cream sherry, which will push it further toward candy. Add it in a slow stream, as directed, or the mixture breaks.
- Creaming warm butter"Proceed at first as if making cake" means softened, not melted, butter beaten with the sugar until pale. Melted butter will separate out later and leave a greasy film on the finished sauce.
- Yield and servingA generous three cups, enough for eight to ten servings over steamed pudding, baked apples, or a plain sponge. The froth collapses as it stands and reheating risks curdling, which is why the book insists on making it at the last minute.
Sauces of this kind sit between the Italian zabaglione and the French sabayon: egg, sugar and fortified wine whisked over gentle heat until foaming, a technique generally traced to Renaissance Italy. Nineteenth-century hotel and pastry manuals filed such sauces under "custard" fairly loosely, the word covering almost anything thickened with egg rather than flour. Madeira and sherry were the standard kitchen wines of the period, cheap, shelf-stable after opening, and already in the pastry cook's cupboard for cakes and jellies, which is why a hot pudding sauce built on them was so readily to hand.