Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Fruit Sauce for Batter Pudding
Fruit Sauce for Batter Pudding
Mix with a fork equal parts of warmed butter and granulated sugar, together with enough fruit juice or essence to flavor the sauce palatably.
A two-ingredient hard sauce with fruit juice standing in for the usual brandy. The whole thing hangs on the butter's temperature.
- "Warmed butter" means softened, not meltedThe butter should be soft enough to mash with a fork but still opaque and holding its shape. If it melts, the juice will separate out; chill it and start the mixing again.
- Proportions and quantityThe original says only "equal parts" and does not say whether by volume or weight; 1/2 cup butter to 1/2 cup granulated sugar is a workable scale. The original gives no yield at all.
- How much juiceThe recipe gives no quantity; start with a tablespoon and work up. Much beyond two or three tablespoons for 1/2 cup of butter tends to break the sauce.
- Sugar choiceGranulated is specified, and undissolved granulated sugar leaves a slight grittiness. Confectioners' sugar produces a smoother, denser sauce and takes liquid better, if that is what you want.
- "Essence" on a 1900 shelf"Essence" on the period shelf -- essence here means a concentrated flavoring extract: lemon, orange, almond, raspberry. Used in place of juice it goes much further, so add it a few drops at a time.
- ServingHard sauces are meant to be served cold or barely cool onto hot pudding, so that they slump rather than pour. Make it ahead, refrigerate, and let it stand ten minutes before it goes to the table.
Batter pudding is the plain English steamed or baked pudding—flour, eggs, milk—that survived in American hotel kitchens as a cheap, reliable dessert, and it was commonly served with a sauce. The sauce here is the standard "hard sauce" of the period, so called because it is served firm rather than as a pouring custard, and it is usually associated with brandy or rum; substituting fruit juice or a bottled essence let one base sauce be flavored a dozen ways from the same crock of creamed butter and sugar. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf dining rooms from 1893, filled his 1896 book with exactly this sort of skeleton formula, in which the printed line gives little more than a reminder of the dish.