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Yellow Sauce for Puddings
Warm one-fourth pound of butter in a basin, but do not let it boil, and beat it to a cream with one-fourth pound of brown sugar; stand the basin in a saucepan containing boiling water, stir the sugar and butter until liquid, and then add the beaten yolks of an egg or two. Keep on stirring with the saucepan placed over a gentle fire until the sauce is thick, then mix in with it one teacupful of brandy, or wine it preferred, and a small quantity of grated nutmeg. The sauce should be served without delay.
Garnishings. How to Prepare a Garnished Bouquet Procure four branches of thoroughly washed parsley-stalks, a branch of soup-celery also thoroughly cleansed, a blade of bay leaf, a sprig of thyme and a couple of cloves placed in the middle of the parsley so as to prevent them from dropping apart; fold it together and tie it with a string.
This is a warm brandy-and-egg pudding sauce built like a sabayon over a water bath. A few of Oscar's terms and quantities need translating, and the last paragraph on the page is a stray entry that has nothing to do with the sauce.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerOnce the yolks go in, the sauce is a custard. Hold the water beneath the bowl at a bare simmer and pull the sauce when it coats a spoon, around 165-170F; past about 180F the yolks curdle and no amount of beating brings them back.
- "Basin" and "saucepan"A basin is a heatproof mixing bowl, and the arrangement described is simply a double boiler. Use a bowl that sits in the pan's rim without touching the water.
- A quarter poundFour ounces of butter is one US stick, 1/2 cup, 113 g. Four ounces of brown sugar is about 1/2 cup, packed.
- A teacupful of brandyThe teacup was an unstandardised measure, reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 6 fl oz; at any of those sizes it will thin this quantity of sauce badly and taste raw. A quarter cup is closer to modern taste.
- "An egg or two"Two yolks give a sauce with real body; one gives something looser and more like a melted butter sauce. Use two.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the finished sauce. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aromatics within months and reads as dusty here.
- Yield and serviceAbout one cup, enough for six modest servings of steamed or baked pudding. Oscar is right that it will not wait: hold it in the warm bowl over the turned-off water for a few minutes at most, stirring, and spoon it out at the table.
- The bouquet paragraphThe garnish note tacked on at the end is a separate reference entry that has run together in the printing. It describes an ordinary bouquet garni for stocks and braises; ignore it when making the sauce.
Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel rather than its chef, and his 1896 Cook Book is a compiler's book: hundreds of short entries pulled from hotel practice and from the English and French domestic manuals then in circulation, which is why a pudding sauce and a note on tying herbs end up in the same paragraph. The sauce itself belongs to the family of warm brandy sauces that accompanied boiled and steamed puddings on both sides of the Atlantic -- the hot, foaming cousin of the cold creamed "hard sauce" served with Christmas pudding. Its structure, sugar and butter creamed and then enriched with yolks over water, sets it apart from a true sabayon, which is yolks, sugar and wine whisked over heat with no butter; the name is often said to describe the color the yolks give it once thickened, though that is an inference rather than a documented explanation. That such a sauce needed a book entry at all says something about the period's dessert course: a steamed pudding was standard closing fare, and the sauce was where the kitchen showed off.