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Foamy Sauce
1/4 cup butter cup light-brown sugar A few drops lemonjuice 4 tablespoonfuls of cream or rich milk teaspoonful vanilla Cream the butter, add the sugar slowly, and beat until very light. Add the cream and flavoring gradually. When ready to serve, stand the bowl over boiling water and stir until the sauce is foamy-looking.
Coffee Pudding (from Sponge-cake) See page 215.
A creamed hard sauce that is warmed and beaten at the last minute so it turns pale and frothy. It is meant to be spooned over a hot pudding, including the cake-based puddings elsewhere in this section.
- The proportions are unclearThe proportions are incomplete -- the butter is given as 1 cup, but the fractions before "cup light-brown sugar" and "teaspoonful vanilla" have dropped out of the text. Treat the missing numbers as unreliable and work from a proportion you trust.
- Butter temperature is the hingeThe butter must be soft enough to cream but not oily, around 65–68F. Butter that has begun to melt will not hold air, and the sauce will break into a greasy puddle instead of foaming.
- Add the liquid slowlyFour tablespoons of cream into creamed butter is a lot of liquid. Beat it in a spoonful at a time, and have the cream at room temperature so the butter does not seize.
- "Stand the bowl over boiling water""Stand the bowl over boiling water" -- in effect a double boiler: a heatproof bowl set over a pan of water. Keep whisking, and take it off as soon as it looks foamy; too much heat will separate it.
- Light-brown sugarModern light brown sugar is fine and gives the same faint molasses note. Sift or rub out lumps first, since undissolved lumps stay gritty in an uncooked sauce.
- Yield and servingWith the sugar quantity missing the yield cannot be pinned down. Make it just before it goes to the table, since the foam falls quickly once off the heat.
- Make-aheadThe creamed butter-and-sugar base can be covered and refrigerated for two or three days. Bring it back to room temperature before setting it over the water, or it will warm unevenly.
Foamy sauce is the soft cousin of hard sauce, the cold creamed butter-and-sugar paste long served with plum pudding. Warming and beating the same mixture over water turns it into something closer to a sabayon without the eggs, and it was a common American accompaniment to steamed and baked puddings around the turn of the twentieth century. Its appearance alongside a pudding made from sponge-cake makes practical sense: stale cake was often said to reappear as coffee pudding, bread pudding or a steamed pudding, with a warm sauce poured over the top to help disguise the age of the cake.