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Raspberry Butter Sauce
Only bright red juice should be used--not purple. The juice of red currants or light red cherries does instead of light raspberries. 1 1/2 pounds of powdered sugar. 3/4 pound of fresh butter. 1/2 pint of red fruit juice.
This is a hard sauce colored red. Have the fruit juice cold. Cream the butter and sugar together, slightly warm and add the juice slowly while beating, like vinegar to a mayonaise, so as not to liquify it. Keep on ice till wanted.
This is a hard sauce — creamed butter and sugar served cold against a hot pudding — tinted and flavored with fruit juice rather than spirits. The whole recipe turns on keeping an emulsion together, and everything else is detail.
- The hinge: add the juice drop by dropThe mayonnaise comparison in the original is exact. A cup of cold liquid dumped into creamed butter is likely to break it into a curdled slurry. Add a teaspoon at a time at the start, beating until it disappears, and stop adding once the sauce stops absorbing cleanly — you do not have to use the full half pint.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period "powdered sugar" usually means a fine-milled sugar between today's superfine and confectioners'. Modern confectioners' sugar works and its cornstarch actually helps hold the liquid; superfine granulated gives a slightly grainier, more old-fashioned texture.
- MeasuresHalf a pint is one cup. Depending on how finely the sugar is milled, one and a half pounds runs to something like 5 to 6 cups; 3/4 pound of butter is three sticks.
- "Slightly warm"This most likely describes the butter and sugar rather than heat applied to the bowl, though the original's wording is ambiguous. Butter at cool room temperature creams properly; much warmer and the sauce is likelier to refuse the juice and to slump at the table.
- Strain the juiceCrush the berries and press the juice through a fine sieve or cloth. Seeds and pulp will make the finished sauce gritty and pulp holds water that encourages separation.
- Why not purple juiceThe color instruction is practical. Overripe raspberries and blackberries read bluish against butterfat. Bright red fruit, red currants or light cherries keep the pink.
- Yield and servingA large batch, roughly two and three-quarter pounds if all the juice is taken up. Chill until firm, then serve in a mound or piped rosettes alongside hot steamed pudding, boiled batter pudding or plain cake.
- If it breaksBeat in a few spoonfuls of additional sifted sugar to re-thicken, or chill the mixture until stiff and re-cream it. Nothing is lost but time.
Hard sauce is the standard nineteenth-century accompaniment to steamed and boiled puddings, and it takes its name from being served firm and cold rather than as a pourable sauce — the contrast with the hot pudding was the point. The classic version is butter, sugar and brandy or sherry, which is why it also travels under the name brandy butter in Britain. A fruit-juice version like this one shows how the same creamed butter and sugar could be flavored with wine, spirits, vanilla, coffee or, as here, colored red for the plate.