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Plum Pudding Sauce
¼ cup butter
2 eggs
1 cup powdered sugar
½ cup rich milk or cream
2 tablespoons cider
Cream the butter and powdered sugar. Add the cider and the well-beaten yolks of the eggs. When well mixed, stir in the milk or cream.
Cook in a double boiler until it is as thick as a custard and then gradually pour it into the beaten whites of the eggs, beating constantly.
A foamy custard sauce for Christmas pudding, built like a zabaglione and finished with beaten whites. The whole thing turns on gentle heat.
- The hinge: keep the custard below a simmerCook the yolk mixture over water that is barely trembling, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon; in modern terms that is somewhere around 170-175F, though the recipe gives no temperature. Sugar and the butter and cream raise the point at which the yolks set, but let it approach a boil and it will curdle, and beating will not bring it back.
- Powdered sugarIn period American usage this often meant a fine granulated sugar rather than today's boxed confectioners' sugar; confectioners' sugar, which carries up to about 3 per cent cornstarch, is the usual modern substitute and does no harm here. Sift it before creaming to avoid lumps.
- CiderIn American usage 'cider' commonly meant sweet, unfermented apple cider, though the word could also mean the fermented drink. Hard cider works and gives more edge; two tablespoons of either is a seasoning, so do not increase it hoping for more flavour.
- Rich milkHalf a cup of half-and-half is the closest modern match. Whole milk gives a thinner sauce, heavy cream a richer and heavier one.
- The egg whitesThe whites are beaten separately and never cooked; the hot custard warms them but will not cook them through. Pour in a thin stream while beating so the heat distributes. Because the whites stay essentially raw, use pasteurized shell eggs, and especially if you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised.
- ButterQuarter cup is half a stick, 4 tablespoons. Have it genuinely soft before creaming, or the sugar will not aerate it and the finished sauce will be grainy.
- Yield and servingSomewhere between a cup and a half and two cups once the whites are in, enough for six to eight portions of pudding. A foam like this is best warm and frothy and will slacken as it stands, so make it close to the moment the pudding is turned out.
Plum pudding arrives at the table needing a sauce, and English and American tradition offers three answers: hard sauce creamed with brandy, a thin brandy or wine sauce, and a foamy egg sauce of this kind. This version uses two tablespoons of cider and no spirits at all. The technique underneath is older and continental in feeling, the same beating of yolks, sugar and liquid over hot water that produces zabaglione and sabayon, with beaten whites folded in at the end to lighten it against a very dense, very rich pudding. The plums, incidentally, are raisins; the word held its older sense of dried fruit generally long after the pudding stopped containing anything a modern shopper would call a plum.