Home › Hot Puddings › Sterling Sauce (Cup butter cup brown sugar)
Sterling Sauce (Cup butter cup brown sugar)
1/2 cup butter 1 cup brown sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla or 2 tablespoons wine 4 tablespoons cream or milk Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and milk and flavoring drop by drop to prevent separation.
An uncooked butter-and-sugar sauce of the hard sauce family, meant to be spooned onto a hot steamed or baked pudding so it melts into it. The whole difficulty is keeping the fat and liquid together.
- The hinge: add liquid drop by dropButter and sugar will hold only a small amount of liquid before breaking into a greasy curd. Add the cream and the flavoring a few drops at a time, beating fully between additions, exactly as the recipe insists. If it does separate, beat in another tablespoon or two of sugar to reabsorb it.
- Butter temperatureCool room temperature, around 65F, is what "cream the butter" assumes. Butter that has gone soft and oily will not hold the sugar in suspension, and butter straight from the refrigerator will stay lumpy.
- SugarBrown sugar in this period was generally a soft, moist sugar, and could be light or dark; either works here. Press out the lumps first, since undissolved crystals in an uncooked sauce stay gritty.
- Measures1/2 cup butter is 4 oz, one stick. 4 tablespoons cream is 1/4 cup. 'Wine' in a sweet pudding sauce of this kind was most likely a sweet fortified wine -- sherry, Madeira or port -- though the recipe does not say which.
- Cream or milkHeavy cream emulsifies far more forgivingly than milk because of its own fat. If using milk, add it in smaller increments still.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 cups, enough for six to eight servings. Chill until firm, then serve in a mound or in small spoonfuls on the hot pudding.
- KeepingIt holds several days covered in the refrigerator and freezes well. Let it come back toward room temperature slightly before serving or it will sit on the pudding as a cold brick.
Sterling sauce belongs to the large family of uncooked "hard sauces" -- butter creamed with sugar and a flavoring -- that English and American cooks served with plum pudding, brown betty, cottage pudding and other hot steamed and baked desserts. Fannie Farmer's book carries a whole run of them, differing mainly in the sugar and the liquor: hard sauce proper with powdered sugar, foamy sauce lightened with egg, and this one built on brown sugar and cream, which gives it a butterscotch flavor. The name is not documented as coming from any particular person or place. What the recipe really records is the cook's technique: before electric mixers, holding an emulsion of butter, sugar and cream together by hand was a skill worth spelling out, and the instruction to add the liquid drop by drop is the entire lesson.