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Brandy Sauce
1/4 cup butter. 1 cup powdered sugar. 2 tablespoon brandy. Yolks 2 eggs Whites 2 eggs 1/2 cup milk or cream Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, then brandy very slowly, well beaten yolks, and milk or cream. Cook over hot water until it thickens as a custard, pour on to beaten whites.
A foamy brandy custard of the sort ladled over steamed and baked puddings. Note first that the text as printed has lost part of its ingredient list, so it cannot be followed literally without judgment from the cook.
- The missing quantitiesThe instructions call for butter, sugar and brandy, but only the eggs and the 1/2 cup of milk or cream carry amounts in this printing. The proportions for the other three are genuinely absent rather than obscure; a sauce of this type in the period generally ran to something on the order of a third of a cup of butter to a cup of powdered sugar, but that is inference, not what the book says.
- Cook over hot water, not boilingThe hinge of the recipe. The yolk mixture must be held in a double boiler over water that is steaming but not bubbling, and stirred constantly. Yolks begin to set from around 150F, and a yolk-and-milk custard thickens in the 170-180F range; once the sauce approaches a simmer it is likely to curdle.
- How thick is "as a custard"Thick enough to coat the back of a spoon and hold a line drawn through it with a finger. That is roughly 170-175F on an instant-read thermometer, and it happens quickly at the end, so pull the pan off the heat before it looks finished.
- Add the brandy slowly for a reasonAlcohol added fast to creamed butter and sugar will break the emulsion and leave a greasy, curdled base that never smooths out. Drizzle it in with the mixer running, as you would oil into mayonnaise.
- The beaten whitesThey are folded into the hot custard rather than cooked, so they stay essentially raw. Use pasteurized whites if the sauce will be served to anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised. Beat them to soft peaks, not stiff, or they will sit on the surface in lumps.
- Serve at onceA foam sauce begins to weep and settle before long. Make it while the pudding finishes and send it to the table warm, in a pitcher or a heated boat.
- YieldThe amounts of butter, sugar and brandy are missing, so no yield can be fixed from the text; the sauce as made would dress a pudding for several people.
Brandy sauce belongs to the family of enriched pudding sauces that anchor the boiled- and baked-pudding chapters of nineteenth-century English and American cookery: hard sauce, wine sauce, foaming sauce, all built on butter and sugar with spirits for flavor and a little egg or cream for body. Books of this kind carry long runs of them because the puddings themselves were plain by design, steamed batters and bread mixtures stretched with suet or milk, and the sauce was where the expense and the flavor went. The custard-and-beaten-white construction here, in which a cooked yolk base is poured over meringue, gives a sauce far lighter than the solid pat of brandy butter still served with British Christmas pudding.