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Caramel Brandy Sauce
Make same as Brandy Sauce, substituting brown sugar in place of powdered sugar.
A one-line variation that depends entirely on the parent recipe printed just above it in the book. Two things are worth knowing before you start: what the original meant by "powdered sugar," and that no caramel is actually cooked here.
- Find the parent recipe firstThis entry gives no quantities at all. Brandy sauces in books of this period come in more than one form — some are creamed butter-and-sugar hard sauces, others thinned with boiling water or bound with egg — so the method, and whether the sauce is served soft or stiff, depends on whichever Brandy Sauce recipe this one follows. Read that one before substituting anything.
- "Powdered sugar" is not modern confectioners' sugarIn turn-of-the-century American usage powdered sugar meant a finely milled white sugar, coarser than today's 10X and without added cornstarch. Superfine or caster sugar is the closest match; modern confectioners' sugar will make a slightly pasty, chalky sauce.
- Which brown sugarLight brown sugar gives the flavour the name promises without overwhelming the brandy. Dark brown or muscovado reads as molasses rather than caramel. Sift or rub out lumps first — brown sugar will not cream smoothly into butter otherwise.
- The "caramel" is not caramelisedNothing is cooked to a caramel stage here. The name refers to the molasses note brown sugar carries, which reads as caramel against the brandy. Do not be tempted to melt sugar first; that changes the texture entirely.
- If the parent sauce is a hard sauceCream the butter thoroughly before adding sugar, add the brandy a spoonful at a time or it will curdle out, and chill the finished sauce so it holds shape and melts over the hot pudding. Brown sugar takes longer to dissolve than white; keep beating past the point where it looks grainy.
- If the parent sauce contains uncooked eggSeveral 1890s dessert sauces are bound with raw beaten egg or egg white and never heated. If yours is one, use pasteurised eggs, particularly if children or anyone immune-compromised will be eating it.
- BrandyThe quantity is whatever the parent Brandy Sauce recipe specifies; this entry gives none. The brandy is not cooked off, so the alcohol remains in the finished sauce.
- Yield and servingYield depends entirely on the parent recipe, which supplies the quantities. It belongs on steamed and boiled puddings — plum, fig, cottage, Indian — spooned on while the pudding is still hot.
Brandy sauce and its stiffer cousin hard sauce are the standard English accompaniments to a boiled or steamed pudding, and they arrived in American cookbooks with the puddings themselves. Nineteenth-century American recipe writing tends to treat them as a family: one base of creamed butter and sugar, then a set of variations in which a single ingredient is swapped. That editorial habit is characteristic of Fannie Farmer's method, which was built on standardised measurement and reproducible base recipes rather than on narrative instruction; once the reader has mastered one sauce, the rest are given as arithmetic. It also reflects a period when brown sugar was cheap, plentiful and less refined than it is now, and when a hot pudding with a spirit-laced sauce closed a great many winter dinners.