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Hard Sauce
1/3 cup butter. 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla. 1 cup sifted powdered sugar. cup butter teaspoonful vanilla 1 cup sifted powdered Nutmeg sugar Cream butter, add gradually powdered sugar, and beat together until light. Add vanilla, pile in dish in which it is to be served, grate nutmeg over top, and set in ice-box until needed.
A creamed butter-and-sugar sauce meant to be spooned cold onto a hot pudding, where it melts. The quantities in the text have lost their fractions, so treat the proportions below as the conventional ones rather than as a reading of the original.
- The usual proportionHard sauce is generally made with roughly one part butter to two or three parts sifted powdered sugar by volume; 1/2 cup butter to 1 cup sugar is one common reading, yielding somewhere around a cup of sauce. The butter figure as printed is incomplete, so scale from the sugar.
- VanillaThe text reads "teaspoonful vanilla," though a fraction may have dropped out. One teaspoon per cup of sugar is a normal strength; much more and the extract's alcohol begins to tell.
- Butter temperatureThe hinge of the recipe. The butter must be soft enough to cream but still cool, around 65F. Melted or greasy butter will not hold air, and the sauce sets grainy instead of light.
- Powdered sugarSift it, as the recipe says. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and packs into lumps that beating will not break up, leaving a gritty sauce.
- "Ice-box"The ice-cooled cabinet that preceded the refrigerator; use the refrigerator. The recipe says only to chill it until needed — it should be cold and firm when it meets the hot pudding, which is the point of the contrast.
- NutmegGrate it over the top only after the sauce is piled in its dish, as the recipe directs.
- Yield and servingPerhaps a cup, on the conventional proportions, serving several. Meant for hot bread pudding, steamed pudding or baked apples, since it works by melting.
- KeepingNo eggs, so it keeps covered in the refrigerator for a week or so. Let it stand a few minutes before serving if it has gone rock hard.
Hard sauce is generally said to take its name from its state rather than its flavour: unlike the pourable custards and wine sauces served with the same puddings, this one is stiff and cut or spooned cold. It is the American cousin of British brandy butter and rum butter, and the plain vanilla-and-nutmeg version here is the temperance household's form of it, with the spirits left out and grated nutmeg carrying the aromatic weight instead. Nutmeg was the standard sweet-pudding spice of the American nineteenth-century kitchen, bought whole and grated to order because the pre-ground article lost its scent quickly on the shelf.