Rum Sauce
1 cup boiling water 1/4 cup rum or wine Make a syrup by boiling sugar and water five minutes; then add rum or wine.
Flûtes Shape Brioche dough in sticks similar to Bread Sticks. Place on a buttered sheet, cover, and let rise fifteen minutes. Brush over with white of one egg slightly beaten and diluted with one-half tablespoon cold water. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and bake ten minutes. These are delicious served with coffee or chocolate.
Two entries have run together here: a rum syrup and the brioche sticks called flûtes. Read them as separate recipes, and note that the sauce's ingredient list has lost a line in transcription.
- The missing sugarThe method calls for boiling sugar and water, but no quantity survives in this printing. A roughly equal weight of sugar to water gives a pourable sauce rather than a thick one. Treat the amount as genuinely unknown and taste as you go.
- Five minutes means five minutesSugar and water boiled hard for five minutes gives a light syrup. Boil it longer and it will thicken noticeably as it cools.
- Add the spirit off the heatStir in the rum or wine after the syrup comes off the burner. Boiling it drives off the alcohol and most of the aroma, which is the only reason the sauce exists.
- Yield and useA modest quantity of sauce, for serving over steamed pudding, plum pudding or plain cake. Rewarm gently.
- Brioche dough for the flûtesThe recipe assumes you already have the book's brioche dough to hand. Any rich egg-and-butter dough will shape into slender sticks, following the book's bread sticks for size.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Ten minutes implies a fairly hot oven; thin enriched dough in a slack oven will dry out before it colours.
- The egg washOne egg white slackened with half a tablespoon of water gives a glaze that holds the sugar without going leathery. Powdered sugar scorches quickly in a hot oven, so watch the last two or three minutes.
- A fifteen-minute riseThat is a short proof, and it keeps the sticks slender rather than letting the dough balloon.
Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book ran to hundreds of pages of short, tightly set entries, and pairings like this one — set against a French bread stick — may well be a side effect of that dense typesetting rather than any culinary logic. Rum sauce belongs to the long Anglo-American tradition of serving steamed and boiled puddings with a sweetened spirit sauce, the sibling of hard sauce (butter, sugar and brandy worked cold) and of the flaming brandy poured over Christmas pudding. Flûte is simply French for flute, the name describing the shape; the same word is also attached to a thin loaf of bread in France. Their appearance here, alongside brioche and served with coffee or chocolate, is generally read as part of an effort to teach middle-class American households a working vocabulary of French pastry at a moment when a formal continental menu was a mark of accomplishment.