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Swiss Sauce
Put one teacupful of cream into a saucepan, and, when boiling, mix with it one wineglassful of sherry that has been thickened with one teaspoonful of flour. Sweeten to taste with sugar, grate a little nutmeg over, and boil it for fifteen minutes. The sauce is then ready for serving.
A sweet sherry-cream sauce for puddings, not a savoury sauce despite the name. Two things in the original need translating: the vessels, and the fifteen-minute boil.
- TeacupfulTeacup measures were not standardised; nineteenth-century sources put a teacupful anywhere from a gill (4 fl oz) to about 6 fl oz, so somewhere between half a cup and three-quarters of a cup of cream. A modern cup will not ruin it, but the sauce will be thinner in proportion to the sherry.
- WineglassfulThe usual nineteenth-century equivalence is 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. That is a strong ratio of sherry to cream by modern taste; halving it gives a milder sauce.
- Thicken the sherry firstThe teaspoon of flour goes into the cold sherry and is whisked smooth before it meets the hot cream. Adding dry flour to hot cream gives lumps that no amount of boiling will fix.
- The fifteen-minute boilLonger than a modern cook needs. Fifteen minutes at a rolling boil will reduce the sauce noticeably and risks the cream separating. Bring it just to a simmer and hold it at a bare tremble for two or three minutes, until the raw flour taste is gone and the sauce coats a spoon.
- Sherry choiceAn oloroso or a cream sherry suits a sweetened sauce; a dry fino will taste thin against the sugar. The alcohol does not fully cook off in a few minutes of gentle simmering.
- Sugar and nutmegStart with two teaspoons of sugar for this quantity and taste, since the sherry itself may be sweet. Grate the nutmeg at the end, off the heat, so the volatile oils are not simmered away.
- YieldRoughly three-quarters of a cup, enough for two to four small servings spooned over steamed pudding, plum pudding, baked apples or a plain sponge. Serve warm; it thickens further as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of cream.
Sweet wine-and-cream sauces were a common finish for boiled and steamed puddings in nineteenth-century hotel and household cookery, alongside hard sauce, foamy sauce and plain sherry sauce; the appeal was that a kitchen could hold cream, sugar, flour and a bottle of sherry at all times and produce a hot sauce in minutes. The name here tells you little about Switzerland; dish names in this period were often attached loosely for tone rather than provenance. Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf, compiled his 1896 book as a working reference of the sort of thing a large hotel kitchen might be asked for, which is why a short dessert sauce like this sits among far more elaborate dishes with no explanation of what it should be served on. The cook was expected to know.