Brandy Sauce
Cream together four heaping table-spoons of sugar (white) and four table-spoons, well-rounded, of soft butter; with this mix a gill of lemon brandy, or half the quantity of brandy, juice of one lemon and half a grated nutmeg; stir slowly into half a cup boiling water, let simmer a moment, pour into a warm tureen. -May Corbin, Covington, Ky.
A pudding sauce of the creamed-butter type, thinned with boiling water rather than cooked as a custard. It comes together in about five minutes, and the only way to spoil it is to let it boil.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. So the recipe wants 1/2 cup lemon brandy, or half that, 1/4 cup, of plain brandy. The lemon juice and nutmeg read as belonging to the plain-brandy version, though the original's punctuation could equally put them in both.
- Lemon brandyA once-common household flavouring: brandy steeped with lemon peel, sold by grocers and druggists alongside rose water and orange-flower water. It has effectively vanished from shops. Plain brandy with the juice of a lemon, as the recipe itself allows, is the intended substitute; a strip of zest left in the brandy for an hour gets closer.
- "Heaping" and "well-rounded"Both mean deliberately more than level. Read the sugar as about 1/3 cup and the butter as something over 1/4 cup, perhaps 5-6 tablespoons. The proportions are forgiving.
- Soft butter, not meltedThe sugar and butter must be creamed to a pale paste before anything liquid goes in. Melted butter will not hold the emulsion and the sauce will break into a greasy pool the moment the water hits it.
- The hinge: simmer a moment, no more"Let simmer a moment" means seconds over low heat, just to warm through and slightly thicken. Sustained boiling splits the butter out and drives off the brandy the sauce exists to deliver.
- NutmegHalf a whole nutmeg, freshly grated, is roughly a rounded teaspoon of ground and is assertive. Pre-ground jarred nutmeg is milder and duller; start with less and taste.
- Yield and servingSomething over a cup and a quarter, enough for six to eight portions of steamed or plum pudding. Warm the tureen or jug as directed, since the sauce cools and stiffens quickly. It does not reheat well; make it at the last minute.
- Uncooked alcoholVery little burns off in a moment's simmer. The brandy goes in near the end and largely stays, which is the point, but worth knowing before serving it to children.
Brandy sauce belongs to the family of English pudding sauces that came to American cookbooks with plum pudding, and this version sits between two of them: the uncooked "hard sauce" of creamed butter and sugar, and the thinner poured sauces let down with water or wine. The Dixie Cook-Book, in a practice often said to be common among late nineteenth-century compilations, gathered its recipes by contribution and printed the donor's name and town, which is why this one carries May Corbin of Covington, Kentucky, at its foot; Covington sits across the Ohio from Cincinnati. Lemon brandy, called for here as the first choice, tells you something about the period pantry: home cooks bought flavouring extracts and cordials in small bottles from the druggist, and lemon, rose and bitter-almond flavourings were standard stock. It faded as commercial vanilla and lemon extracts took over the shelf, and the recipe's own fallback -- plain brandy with a fresh lemon -- is the reason it can still be made at all.