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Plain Cream Sauce
One pint cream, three table-spoons brown sugar, and half a small nutmeg grated.
Three ingredients and no method, which was normal for a dessert sauce in a book that assumed the cook knew what to do with cream. The only real decision is whether to serve it liquid or whipped.
- Quantities in modern termsOne pint is two cups of cream; three tablespoons of brown sugar makes a lightly sweet sauce, not a syrup. Half a small nutmeg grated is roughly 3/4 to 1 teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg, which is assertive — start with half that if you are unsure.
- The hinge: do not cook itMethod is left out entirely -- Nothing in the list requires heat, so the simplest reading is a cold sauce: whisk the sugar and nutmeg into cold cream and let it stand a few minutes so the brown sugar dissolves.
- Liquid or whippedAs written this reads as a pouring sauce for puddings and pies. If you want it thick, chill the cream well and whip to soft peaks first, then fold in the sugar and nutmeg — use heavy cream, since light cream or half-and-half will not whip.
- Brown sugar has changedNineteenth-century brown sugar was less refined and more variable than today's. Light brown sugar is the closer match; dark brown will push the sauce toward molasses and overwhelm the nutmeg.
- Grate the nutmeg freshPre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aroma within months, and this sauce is essentially cream plus nutmeg. Use a whole nut and a fine rasp.
- Yield and keepingTwo cups of sauce, enough for eight to ten servings of pudding. Keep it covered and cold and use within a day or two; once whipped it will begin to weep after a few hours.
Sweetened cream flavored with nutmeg is a very old dessert accompaniment in English-language cookery, and by the time The Dixie Cook Book was compiled in the 1880s it was the plainest member of a whole family of pudding sauces — the others thickened with butter and flour, enriched with egg, or spiked with wine and brandy. "Plain" in these books generally signals the absence of the usual enrichments — no egg, no wine or brandy — rather than an apology for the sauce. Nutmeg was a common sweet spice in American kitchens of the period, and is often reached for where a modern cook would use vanilla extract.