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Cream Sauce (One tea-cup powdered white)
One tea-cup powdered white sugar, scant half tea-cup butter, half tea-cup rich cream; beat butter and sugar thoroughly, add cream, stir the whole into half tea-cup boiling water, place on stove for a few moments, stirring it constantly, take off and add flavoring.
A sweet pudding sauce rather than a savory one — closer to a poured hard sauce than to what a modern cook means by cream sauce. It comes together in a few minutes and lives or dies on not letting it boil.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerOnce the cream goes in, the mixture only needs to be hot enough to dissolve the sugar and thicken slightly. A real boil will break the butter out into a greasy layer and there is no reliable way back.
- What a tea-cup meansNineteenth-century American tea-cups run between 1/2 and 3/4 of a modern cup. Treating the tea-cup as 3/4 cup gives roughly 3/4 cup sugar, 6 tablespoons butter, and 6 tablespoons each cream and boiling water; the proportions matter more than the absolute size.
- Powdered white sugarIn 1880s usage this is granulated sugar ground fine, not the modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch. Superfine or caster sugar is the closest match; confectioners' will work but adds a faint starchiness.
- Rich creamPeriod cream was unstandardized, so 'rich cream' simply means the top, fattiest cream; modern heavy cream is the closest stand-in. Half-and-half or light cream will thin the sauce noticeably and is likelier to curdle against the sugar and heat.
- Beating the butter and sugarButter at cool room temperature creams properly; cold butter will stay in lumps that never fully disperse once the liquid goes in. Beat until pale and no sugar grain is visible on the back of a spoon.
- The flavoringLeft open deliberately. Standard choices in this book's period are vanilla, grated nutmeg, lemon zest or juice, and brandy, sherry or rum — one to two teaspoons of an extract or spirit for this quantity. Add it off the heat so the volatiles survive.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup and a quarter of a thin, pourable sauce, enough for six to eight servings. It was intended hot over steamed and boiled puddings, batter pudding, apple dumplings or plain cake.
- Holding and reheatingIt separates as it stands and stiffens in the refrigerator. Rewarm gently over low heat or a water bath, whisking, and it will come back together; do not let it catch a boil in the process.
Pudding sauces of this kind fill several pages of American cookbooks from the 1860s through the century's end, because the puddings they accompanied — boiled, steamed, baked in a dish — were plain by design and expected a sauce to finish them. The family divides into hard sauce (butter and sugar creamed and served cold, unheated), foamy sauce (with beaten egg), and liquid sauces like this one, where boiling water or milk turns the creamed base into something pourable. The vagueness of "add flavoring" is characteristic: the writer assumed a cook who knew which extract or spirit her family expected with which pudding.