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Brandy Sauce (Melt one rounding)
Melt one rounding tablespoonful butter. Add three level tablespoonfuls corn starch, one-half tablespoonful flour, few grains salt. When well blended, add one pint hot water gradually, stirring constantly, and cook five or six minutes. Then add three-fourths of a cup of brown sugar, cook a minute, add one teaspoonful vanilla extract and one tablespoonful brandy. Remove from fire, add one rounding tablespoonful butter, and beat until very smooth. Strain if necessary. Serve with steamed puddings.
A cornstarch-thickened dessert sauce built like a roux-based one, which is unusual and accounts for the small amount of flour. Nothing here is obscure, but a few proportions and steps deserve comment.
- The hinge: butter off the heatThe second tablespoon of butter goes in after the pan leaves the fire, and beating it in there is what gives the sauce its gloss and body. Butter beaten into a sauce still at a full boil is more likely to separate out and leave an oily surface.
- MeasuresOne pint is 2 cups. "A rounding tablespoonful" of butter is a generous tablespoon, roughly 20 g; "few grains salt" is a pinch. Three level tablespoons cornstarch plus half a tablespoon flour will set 2 cups of liquid to a pourable, coating consistency.
- Why the flour is therePure cornstarch sets clear and slightly slick. The half tablespoon of flour will cloud it slightly, and flour-based sauces tend to hold up better than pure cornstarch ones when kept warm; the recipe gives no reason for the addition, so this is inference.
- Adding the waterHot water into the butter-and-starch paste, poured in a thin stream with constant stirring, is the whole technique. Five or six minutes of cooking is not padding: cornstarch needs to come to a full boil and hold it briefly, or the sauce tastes chalky and sets poorly.
- Sugar goes in lateBrown sugar added after the starch has set may well be deliberate. Sugar competes with the starch for water and raises the temperature at which it gelatinizes, so a sauce sweetened at the start thickens less reliably. One minute is enough to dissolve it.
- Brandy quantityOne tablespoon in 2 cups is a very restrained hand, and some of the alcohol will cook off in the minute before the pan comes off the fire. Two or three tablespoons reads much closer to what many people now expect from a brandy sauce. Note that the recipe adds the brandy and vanilla while the pan is still on the heat, not after.
- Straining"Strain if necessary" means through a fine sieve if the starch lumped. The recipe puts it last, after the final butter has been beaten in.
- Yield and holdingNearer 2½ cups, enough for six to eight servings. Keep it warm in a bowl over hot water with a round of parchment on the surface; it forms a skin quickly and stiffens as it cools, so thin with a spoonful of hot water if needed.
Brandy sauce belongs to the English tradition of steamed and boiled puddings that American cookbooks inherited wholesale, and it sat alongside hard sauce (butter and sugar creamed with spirits, served cold) as the standard accompaniment to a Christmas or suet pudding. This version is built on cornstarch, cheap and widely marketed by then, which gave a household a glossy sauce with no eggs and only two tablespoons of butter — no custard to curdle, no separation to fear, made from pantry staples in ten minutes.