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Plum Pudding Sauce
Cream one quarter of a cup of butter and one cup powdered sugar. To this add two tablespoons of brandy and the well beaten yolks of two eggs. When well mixed, stir in one half cup of rich milk or cream. Cook in a double boiler until it is as thick as a custard and then pour on to the beaten whites of the two eggs.
A brandy custard sauce for Christmas pudding, in the older style where a cooked yolk custard is lightened with beaten whites rather than whipped cream. The whole thing lives or dies on the temperature of the custard.
- The hinge: custard temperatureCook over barely simmering water, stirring constantly, until the mixture coats the spoon, around 170–175F. Taken much hotter the yolks begin to curdle, and a badly broken sauce is difficult to recover.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered sugar" means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match; modern confectioners' sugar will work but adds a faint starchy body.
- Rich milk or cream"Rich milk" at the time meant unhomogenized whole milk with a good deal of cream in it. Use half-and-half, or whole milk with a spoonful of heavy cream.
- Butter quantityA quarter cup is 4 tablespoons, 2 oz. Cream it soft rather than melted, or it will separate out when the sugar goes in.
- Folding in the whitesPour the hot custard onto the stiffly beaten whites in a thin stream while whisking, then fold gently. The heat sets the whites only partially, so anyone avoiding lightly cooked egg should use pasteurized whites.
- Serve warm, and soonThis is a foam sauce and it deflates. Make it while the pudding is steaming out its last half hour and spoon it over at the table; it will not hold in the refrigerator without collapsing into a thin custard.
- YieldAbout two cups of sauce, enough for eight to ten servings of a steamed pudding.
Boiled and steamed plum puddings had by the late nineteenth century detached themselves almost entirely from plums — the name preserves the older English sense of "plum" as any dried fruit, chiefly raisins and currants. What varied from household to household was the sauce, and American cookbooks of the period print whole clusters of them: hard sauce creamed with butter and sugar, thin brandy sauces thickened with flour, and foamy sauces like this one, which is essentially a stirred custard aerated with egg white. The Butterick Publishing Company came to cookbooks by way of dress patterns and The Delineator, and its cooking instruction has the same character as its sewing instruction: standardized cup measurements, a preference for the double boiler over guesswork, and the assumption that a reader could be taught technique rather than simply handed a formula.