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Sweet Sauce
Put one teacupful of cream into a saucepan and boil it. Mix one teaspoonful of flour with one wineglassful of sherry, stir it into the boiling cream, add a small quality of grated nutmeg, and sweeten to taste with sugar. Let the sauce simmer by the side of the fire for fifteen minutes, stirring constantly, and then serve.
A cream-and-sherry pudding sauce of the older English type, thickened with barely enough flour to give it body. The whole thing depends on keeping the pan below a boil once the wine goes in.
- TeacupfulIn cookbooks of this period a teacup is usually reckoned at about 6 fl oz, smaller than the standard 8 oz measuring cup, though the term was not fixed. Read it as roughly three-quarters of a cup of cream; a richer cream will hold together better than a thin one.
- WineglassfulRoughly 2 fl oz, or a quarter cup. That is a generous proportion of sherry to cream, so use a decent medium-dry oloroso or amontillado rather than cooking sherry.
- The hinge: no second boilCream is boiled first, then the sherry-and-flour mixture goes in. Once the wine is in, hold the pan at a bare simmer. Alcohol and acid both encourage cream to break, and a hard boil will curdle it.
- "By the side of the fire"On a range this means the coolest spot, off direct heat. Translate it as the lowest burner setting, or a heatproof bowl over barely simmering water if your stove will not go low enough.
- Flour slurryWhisk the teaspoon of flour into the cold sherry until smooth before it meets the hot cream, or it will lump. One teaspoon in this quantity gives a pouring sauce, not a thick one.
- Fifteen minutesLonger than modern practice would use for a flour thickener, but it is here to cook out the raw taste of the flour and reduce the sauce slightly. Stir throughout; the sugar makes it prone to catching.
- Sugar"sweeten to taste"; two to three tablespoons is a reasonable starting point for this quantity. The recipe adds it before the simmer, but adding part of it later and tasting does no harm, since the sherry brings some sweetness of its own.
- YieldAbout a cup, enough for four to six servings. It is meant to be spooned hot over a steamed or boiled pudding, baked apples, or plain cake.
Sweet sauces built on cream, wine and nutmeg descend from the English pudding sauces that dominated nineteenth-century dessert cookery, where a boiled or steamed pudding was rarely sent to table dry. Sherry was often said to be the usual flavouring in this family of sauces, alongside its close relatives flavoured with brandy or Madeira, and grated nutmeg was so nearly automatic a partner to cream and wine that recipes often did not bother to explain it. Oscar Tschirky's inclusion of so plain a preparation in a collection published under the Waldorf name is a reminder that a grand hotel kitchen seems to have depended on a stock of simple, repeatable accompaniments as much as on showpieces; the direction to let it stand "by the side of the fire" is a coal-range habit that survived in print well after gas ranges had arrived.