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Fine French Sauce
Cream a small cup of sugar, and one (scant) of butter; add beaten yolk, or white if preferred, and a gill of wine; simmer a few moments, grate nutmeg over it when taken from fire. - Mrs. Harrison, Ky.
This is a sweet wine sauce for puddings, not a savory French sauce despite the name. It is essentially a loose zabaglione stabilized with butter, and it lives or dies by how gently it is heated.
- Do not let it boil"Simmer a few moments" is optimistic language for what should be a bare tremble over low heat or a double boiler. Once the egg passes about 180F it scrambles and the butter breaks out as a greasy slick; pull it while it is still thick and pourable.
- A gillHalf a cup in American measure. If you are working from a British-influenced text it can mean 5 fl oz, but in a Kentucky contribution to an American book, 1/2 cup is the sensible reading.
- "A small cup" and "scant"Cups in the 1880s ran smaller and less standard than ours. Read the sugar as about 3/4 cup and the butter as a generous 3/4 cup -- roughly a stick and a half -- and adjust for your own taste rather than treating either figure as exact.
- The wineUnspecified, which in this period often meant sherry, Madeira or a sweet white. Any of those work; a dry table wine leaves the sauce thin and sharp against that much sugar.
- Yolk or whiteOne egg is meant. The yolk gives a richer, deeper-colored sauce; the beaten white gives a paler, foamier one that collapses faster and should be served immediately.
- Nutmeg off the heatGrating it in after the pan leaves the fire is deliberate — nutmeg's aromatics are volatile and go flat if simmered. Use whole nutmeg on a fine grater, not pre-ground.
- Yield and servingAround two cups, enough for six to eight servings. Serve warm over steamed or boiled pudding, baked apples, or plain cake; it will set firm if refrigerated and can be rewarmed very gently.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks used "French" as a marker of refinement more than of origin, and a great many sweet pudding sauces carried the label with no particular French pedigree. The technique behind this one is real enough: sugar, egg and wine warmed together is the same idea as Italian zabaglione and French sabayon, here enriched with the heavy hand of butter that distinguishes English and American hard sauces. The Dixie Cook Book, like many compilation cookbooks of its era, was assembled from contributions signed by name and state, and "Mrs. Harrison, Ky." is typical of that pattern.