Home › Puddings and Pudding Sauces › Creamy Sauce
Creamy Sauce
Cream two tablespoons butter; beat in by degrees one-half cup powdered sugar, two tablespoons each of thick cream and sherry. Beat long and hard.
Just before serving stand bowl over hot water and beat until sauce looks creamy, but is not hot enough to melt the butter.
A creamed butter sauce in the hard-sauce family, warmed just enough at the end to loosen it. The whole thing turns on temperature at that last step.
- The hingeOver the hot water the bowl should feel barely warm, no more. If the butter melts the emulsion breaks and you get a greasy pool with sugar at the bottom, which is hard to bring back by beating alone. Pull it off the moment it looks glossy and pourable.
- Butter and creamTwo tablespoons butter is one ounce; use unsalted, at proper room temperature, or it will not cream. "Thick cream" here means heavy or double cream, 36% fat or higher — half-and-half will not hold.
- Powdered sugarModern confectioners' sugar contains 3% cornstarch, which the period product often did not. It thickens slightly and can taste faintly raw; sift it and beat the sauce longer to compensate.
- "Beat long and hard"Five minutes with a hand mixer, or a good ten by hand with a wooden spoon. The volume and pale colour are the point; underbeaten, the sherry tastes sharp and separate rather than absorbed.
- Adding the liquidTwo tablespoons cream plus two of sherry is a lot of liquid for one ounce of butter. Add it a teaspoon at a time, beating each addition in fully, or it will curdle.
- The sherryA medium or cream sherry suits this better than a dry fino. It is not cooked off, so use something drinkable; the alcohol remains, which matters if you are serving children.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly two-thirds of a cup, enough for four to six servings spooned over steamed or baked pudding. Make it the same day — refrigerated it sets hard and rewarming it past lukewarm will split it.
This is a loosened cousin of hard sauce, the creamed butter-and-sugar paste that English cooks served with plum pudding and that American books of the period listed under several names — brandy sauce, Sterling sauce, cream sauce. Warming it over hot water at the last minute was the trick for pouring it over a hot pudding without having it slide off in a lump, and cookbooks of the 1900s repeat the warning against letting the butter actually melt. Sauces like this were the cheap luxury of the era's dessert course, requiring no baking, no eggs and no skill beyond patience with a spoon.