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Burnt Cream Sauce
The following sauce may be used either for custard or batter pudding. Put two ounces of granulated sugar into a small saucepan and stir it over the fire until a dark brown; pour in slowly with the sugar one teacupful of thin cream, or two tablespoonfuls of milk and two tablespoonfuls of cream, and continue stirring the sauce over the fire until the cream is hot, then turn it into a sauceboat, and serve.
A dry caramel loosened with cream — four lines of text that stand or fall on how far you take the sugar. Everything else is stirring.
- The hinge: how dark is dark brownGranulated sugar melts clear, goes straw, then amber, then a deep reddish brown, and the window between deep brown and acrid is perhaps thirty seconds over a moderate flame. Pull it off the heat the moment it smells nutty rather than sharp; residual heat in the pan keeps it cooking.
- Two ounces of sugarThat is weight, not volume: about a quarter cup of granulated sugar. A small heavy saucepan is essential, since a thin pan will scorch the sugar in patches before the rest has melted.
- A teacupfulNineteenth-century teacups were smaller than modern mugs, and the measure was never standardised: it is reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 6 fluid ounces, so perhaps two-thirds of a cup. The measure is genuinely loose, and the sauce is forgiving; add cream until it pours the way you want it to.
- The second version is not the same sauceTwo tablespoons of milk and two of cream is a quarter cup of liquid against a whole teacupful in the first option. That makes a thick, almost fudge-like caramel rather than a pouring sauce. Treat them as two different consistencies, not as equivalents.
- Thin cream"Thin cream" in this period is usually taken to mean something like today's light cream, in the region of 18 to 20 percent fat; half-and-half is thinner than that. Heavy cream works and gives a richer sauce; whole milk alone will be loose and slightly thin in flavour.
- Pour slowly, and warm the creamCold liquid hitting caramel at well over 300F erupts violently and throws steam. Warm the cream first and add it in a thin stream off the heat, then return the pan to a low flame.
- If it seizesThe caramel may set into hard lumps when the cream goes in. This is normal — keep the pan over low heat and stir until the lumps dissolve back into the cream, which takes a minute or two.
- Yield and servingThe full-cream version makes about two-thirds of a cup, enough for four to six servings of custard or batter pudding. It thickens noticeably as it cools; serve it warm from the sauceboat as directed.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf — he was the maître d'hôtel — but his 1896 collection gathered the hotel's working repertoire, and this sauce belongs to its plainest tier: the things sent out with a nursery-simple pudding. "Burnt" here is the old English term for caramelised sugar, the same sense preserved in "burnt sugar" colouring and in the English "burnt cream" that food writers have long linked to crème brûlée. Custard and batter puddings are both cheap, and the sauce shows how a kitchen made economy dishes presentable: the pudding costs pennies, the sauce arrives in its own boat, and the whole thing reads as a course.