Home › Recipes › Hot Cream Sauce
Hot Cream Sauce
For drop dumplings, etc. 1 quart of thin cream. 3/4 pound of sugar. 1 ounce of butter. 1 ounce of starch, (a heaping tablespoonfull) Flavoring of broken nutmeg or stick cinnamon.
Boil the milk with the piece of cinnamon and half the sugar in it--the sugar prevents burning--and stir in the rest of the sugar with the starch mixed in it dry. When cooked thick beat in the butter and strain for use.
A straightforward starch-thickened sweet cream sauce, built at hotel scale. The technique is sound; only the units and the sugar level need attention.
- Thin creamIn the trade of this period "thin cream" meant something in the range of modern light cream: thinner than whipping cream, but with no standardised fat content. Note that the method line then says "boil the milk" — the writer is using the words loosely, and the quart of thin cream is what goes in the pan.
- The starch measure is inconsistentOne ounce of starch by weight (the recipe does not say which starch) is roughly three to four level tablespoons, not the heaping tablespoon given in the parenthesis. Follow the tablespoon if you want a pourable sauce; the full ounce gives something closer to a thick pudding sauce that will set as it cools.
- SugarThree-quarters of a pound is about 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups to a quart of cream — very sweet by current taste, calibrated for plain boiled dumplings. Half that amount gives a less sweet sauce, and the sauce still behaves the same.
- Why the sugar goes in in two partsThe first half sweetens the infusion and, as the book says, buffers the bottom of the pan; the second half is there as a carrier so the dry starch disperses without lumping. Mix starch and sugar thoroughly while both are dry before it meets any liquid.
- Bring it properly to the boilCornstarch needs to reach a full boil for a minute or so to thicken fully and lose its raw, chalky flavor. Stir constantly at that stage, then take it off the heat before beating in the butter — butter added off the boil keeps the gloss.
- Whole spice, not ground"Broken nutmeg" means a whole nutmeg cracked with the side of a knife, and stick cinnamon is a whole quill. Both are infused into the hot cream and removed by the final straining, which is why the sauce stays pale rather than speckled. Ground spice will not strain out.
- Holding and servingYield is about a quart, enough for 8 to 12 servings of dumplings, pudding or fruit. It skins over as it sits; press plastic film onto the surface, and thin with a little hot cream when reheating gently.
This reads like a large-kitchen sauce: a quart at a time, whole spices for clean flavor and easy removal, cornstarch instead of egg yolks. In kitchens turning out steamed and boiled puddings and "drop dumplings" in quantity, an egg custard was both costlier and far likelier to curdle on a busy range than a starch-bound cream. Cornstarch is generally said to have become a cheap, reliable pantry staple in the United States sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century, and its arrival is often credited with changing dessert sauces of exactly this kind. The instruction that sugar in the pan prevents scorching may be trade lore rather than sound chemistry; what more likely saves the sauce is steady stirring and moderate heat.