Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Extra Nice Pudding Sauce
Extra Nice Pudding Sauce
Mrs, Hamilton.
One cup of butter, two of sugar, well beaten, then add two eggs and beat some time; when ready for soaking add a cup of sherry wine, and put it over a pot of boiling water, and let it cook ten minutes, stirring very often. It is then ready for the table.
A rich boiled wine sauce for steamed or baked puddings, built like a custard on a base of creamed butter and sugar. Everything depends on keeping the heat gentle enough that the eggs thicken instead of scrambling.
- The hinge: gentle heatSet the bowl over water that is barely simmering, not at a rolling boil, and do not let the bottom of the bowl touch the water. Stir constantly rather than "very often" — the butter and sugar give the eggs very little protection, and a hot spot will curdle the sauce in seconds.
- "When ready for soaking"An odd phrase whose sense is unclear. Read it as: once the eggs are fully beaten in, add the wine and proceed.
- MeasurementsOne cup butter is 8 oz / 225 g, two cups sugar about 14 oz / 400 g. Nineteenth-century cup measures were not standardised, but they were usually close enough to the modern 8 fl oz that the proportions here work as written.
- Ten minutes, and how to judge itTime is a poor guide over a water bath. Cook until the sauce coats the back of a spoon and reads about 170°F / 77°C, which also puts the eggs safely past pasteurisation. Ten minutes is a reasonable estimate for that.
- The sherryA cup of sherry is a great deal of liquid for two eggs to carry, which is why the sauce stays pourable rather than setting. Use a drinkable medium or cream sherry; salted "cooking sherry" will throw the balance. Only some of the alcohol cooks off in ten minutes of gentle heating.
- If it splitsPull it off the heat immediately and whisk hard, adding a tablespoon of cold cream. A sauce that has gone fully grainy will not come back.
- Yield and servingRoughly 3 to 3½ cups, enough for eight to ten servings. Serve warm, spooned over a steamed plum, bread or cottage pudding; it thickens as it cools and can be rewarmed over the same water bath.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women, with proceeds going to charity, which is why entries arrive credited to a Mrs. Hamilton rather than to an author. Sweet wine sauces of this kind were a common accompaniment to the heavy steamed and boiled puddings that closed a Victorian dinner — plum pudding, cottage pudding, suet pudding — dishes dense enough to need something rich and liquid poured over them. The "extra nice" in the title is doing real work: plain pudding sauces of the period were often just butter, sugar and hot water thickened with flour, so the addition of eggs and a full cup of sherry marked this out as company fare.