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Hard Sauce (Beat one cup sugar)
Beat one cup sugar and one-half cup butter to white cream; add whites two eggs; beat few minutes longer; add tablespoon brandy and teaspoon extract nutmeg; put on ice until needed.
A standard creamed hard sauce for steamed and boiled puddings, but this version is bound with raw egg white and then held cold and eaten cold, so it is one of the period recipes that does not carry over.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites go in uncooked and the sauce is chilled and served as is, so nothing in the method ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Unlike a raw egg in a batter or custard base, there is no later cooking step to fall back on. Use a current hard sauce recipe, which will either omit the egg or call for pasteurised whites.
- Holding it "on ice"Refrigeration only slows bacterial growth; it does not undo the problem. An uncooked egg-white sauce that sits chilled for hours before a pudding is served is being stored, not made safe.
- Extract nutmegThis means oil or essence of nutmeg, a concentrated flavouring sold by druggists alongside vanilla and lemon extracts. A teaspoon of it is a great deal by modern standards; freshly grated nutmeg is the usual modern substitute.
- "Beat to white cream"The instruction is describing the visual endpoint of creaming butter and sugar until the mixture pales and lightens, which by hand took real work.
- Sugar typeThe recipe does not say which sugar to use; coarse granulated would need long beating to dissolve, while confectioners' sugar gives a smooth result more quickly.
- YieldOne cup of sugar with half a cup of butter makes roughly a cup and a half of sauce; the recipe states no yield or number of servings.
Hard sauce is the cold, firm counterpart to the warm pudding sauces of the period: creamed butter and sugar, flavoured with spirits, set cold so that it melts on contact with a hot steamed pudding. The name distinguishes it from the poured or "soft" sauces; in Britain the brandy-flavoured version became attached to Christmas pudding and is often called brandy butter. The addition of beaten egg white here lightens the texture, a trick that also turns up in uncooked creamed frostings of the same era, and it belongs to a time when kitchens treated raw egg as an ordinary aerating ingredient.