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Hard Sauce
Have in readiness a warm but not hot bowl, and in it place a teacup of powdered sugar, one-fourth of a cup of butter, a teaspoon of vanilla extract or the grating of a lemon or three tablespoons of sherry; or, perhaps, a little nutmeg and one-half a teaspoon of powdered cinnamon, and beat until well creamed. Arrange the sauce upon a pretty dish and set it in a cool place until required. This sauce may be used with hot pudding of any kind.
A hard sauce — the title is a printer's slip for "Hard Sauce" — made by creaming butter and sugar with a flavouring and chilling it firm. No cooking is involved, so the only real variables are temperature and the quality of the butter.
- The warm bowl is the whole trickButter creams smoothly at around 65F and breaks into greasy specks if it is either cold or melted. Warming the bowl takes the chill off and helps bring the butter into that window; a bowl straight from hot water will slump it into oil.
- A teacup is not a teacupIn this period a teacup as a measure is usually reckoned at about 3/4 of a modern cup, though books were inconsistent. Taken with the quarter cup of butter, the ratio is roughly 3:1 sugar to butter by volume.
- Powdered sugar then and nowIn this period "powdered sugar" usually meant sugar ground finer than granulated but coarser than today's 10X, and without cornstarch. Modern confectioners' sugar works and gives a smoother sauce; superfine (caster) sugar is closer to the original and leaves a faint grain.
- The ratio is lean by modern standardsMany modern hard sauces run closer to equal weights of butter and sugar, sometimes more butter. As written this sets very firm and reads sweet; cooks who want it richer can push the butter toward half a cup.
- Choose one flavouringThe list is alternatives, not a sequence — vanilla, or lemon zest, or sherry, or the nutmeg-and-cinnamon pair. Three tablespoons of sherry into a quarter cup of butter is a lot of liquid; add it a spoonful at a time or the emulsion will separate.
- Chilling and shaping"A cool place" meant a pantry, cellar or icebox; the refrigerator serves. An hour firms it enough to hold ridges from a fork or a piping tube; hard sauce was sometimes pressed into a mould or heaped and scored on a small glass dish.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough for six to eight servings of pudding. Serve it cold on the hot pudding so it half-melts at the table — that contrast is the point of the sauce.
Hard sauce takes its name from its texture rather than its strength: it is "hard" in contrast to the poured, cooked pudding sauces served warm. The form is English, generally traced to the brandy butter served with Christmas pudding and mince pies, and American cookbooks of the nineteenth century carried it forward under the plainer name, often with sherry, wine or vanilla in place of brandy. Butterick's inclusion of a nutmeg-and-cinnamon version shows how far the sauce could travel from its spirituous original, and the instruction to arrange it "upon a pretty dish" is a reminder that a moulded or forked-up sauce was one of the few decorative gestures available at the end of a family dinner.