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Wine Sauce
Take one cup of butter; two cups of powdered sugar; eight tablespoons of sherry; a grating of nutmeg. Beat the butter until creamy, and gradually add the sugar, stirring all the time; when all the sugar has been used, add the wine by spoonfuls, still stirring. Beat the mixture until it becomes a smooth, light froth, set the bowl in a basin of hot water, and stir it for two minutes. Fill the sauceboat with boiling water to heat it, and when the sauce has cooked sufficiently, empty the boat, pour in the sauce, grate a bit of nutmeg on the top, and serve hot.
A creamed butter-and-sugar sauce loosened with sherry, warmed just enough to slacken it before serving over a steamed or boiled pudding. The whole thing hinges on temperature control at the end.
- Do not let it get hotThe bowl goes into hot water, not over direct heat, and only for about two minutes. Push it further and the butter melts out, the emulsion splits, and you are left with sweet sherry sitting on a pool of oil. If it does break, take it off the heat and beat in a spoonful of soft butter.
- Powdered sugarIn this period that generally means finely ground granulated sugar rather than modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Either works here; confectioners' sugar dissolves faster and gives a slightly softer set, superfine granulated gives more body.
- QuantitiesOne cup butter is 8 oz or two sticks; eight tablespoons of sherry is half a cup. That is a generous ratio of wine to fat, so add it a spoonful at a time as directed or the sauce will curdle rather than absorb it.
- The sherryA medium or cream sherry suits this best; a bone-dry fino leaves the sauce tasting thin against two cups of sugar. The alcohol is not cooked off, which is worth knowing if children are at the table.
- Heating the sauceboatNot a flourish. A cold porcelain boat will chill and stiffen this sauce within a minute, so the boiling-water rinse is doing real work. Warm the pudding plates for the same reason.
- NutmegGrate it fresh, both into the sauce and over the top. Pre-ground nutmeg has lost most of its volatile oil and will read as dusty against the wine.
- YieldRoughly two to three cups once beaten light, enough for a plum pudding or steamed batter pudding served to a table of eight or so. It can be creamed ahead and refrigerated, then brought to room temperature and given its two minutes over hot water at the last moment.
Wine sauce belongs to the family of butter-and-sugar pudding sauces that English and American cooks built around the boiled and steamed puddings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its unheated cousin, hard sauce, is the same creamed butter and sugar with brandy or sherry beaten in and then chilled firm; this version simply warms the mixture so it pours. Sherry rather than brandy points to a household stocking a fortified wine for general kitchen and sideboard use, which was ordinary enough in a well-provisioned American home around 1900. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, issued its cook book as part of a broad line of domestic manuals aimed at the same middle-class readership.