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Cream Sauce (Cup butter cup powdered sugar)
1/4 cup butter 1 cup powdered sugar ½ teaspoon vanilla 1/4 cup heavy cream Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, vanilla, and cream beaten until stiff. 1/2 cup butter ½ cup flour 2 cups milk
A whipped dessert sauce of the hard-sauce family, meant to be spooned cold onto a hot steamed or baked pudding. The transcription has picked up stray text at the end, which is worth sorting out before you start.
- Ignore the last lineThe trailing "1/2 cup butter, 1/2 cup flour, 2 cups milk" belongs to a different sauce — a thick flour-and-milk white sauce that shares the name "cream sauce" in older books. It has nothing to do with the butter-and-sugar sauce whose method is given here. Use only the first four ingredients.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn nineteenth-century American vocabulary powdered sugar generally meant granulated sugar ground finer, listed separately from the finer "confectioners'" grade, and it would not have had the starch content of a modern box. Modern confectioners' sugar works and dissolves readily, though it may taste faintly starchy; superfine or caster sugar is the closer match.
- Order of operationsThe wording is compressed: cream the softened butter, work in the sugar a spoonful at a time, beat in the vanilla, then fold in cream that has been whipped stiff separately. Whipping the cream first and folding it last is what makes this lighter than plain hard sauce.
- Butter temperature is the hingeThe butter wants to be soft enough to cream but not oily, in the region of 65F. Butter that is too warm will not hold the whipped cream well and the sauce can break into a greasy pool.
- Heavy creamModern heavy cream, at 36 percent fat or above, is the right choice; lighter whipping creams (around 30 percent) whip less firmly. Ultra-pasteurized cream tends to whip more slowly and hold less air, so standard pasteurized is better if you can get it.
- Yield and servingSomething over a cup, perhaps a cup and a half once the whipped cream is folded in, enough for six servings. Chill it firm and serve cold against a hot pudding — the contrast is the whole point. It keeps covered in the refrigerator for two or three days but should be re-whisked before serving.
Butter-and-sugar sauces beaten cold and served on hot puddings run all through nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery under a family of names — hard sauce, brandy butter, and in the American books plain "pudding sauce" or "cream sauce." This one is the enriched version, with whipped cream folded into the creamed butter to lighten it, and it was meant to dress steamed and boiled puddings. The confusion in the transcription is itself telling: "cream sauce" in this period could equally mean this sweet whip or the flour-thickened milk sauce used for creamed vegetables and fish, and the same book may well carry both. The sweet version reflects a period when a substantial molded pudding still ended many family dinners, and when a cook could expect soft butter, fine sugar and a bowl of thick cream within easy reach.