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French Pudding Sauce
Mrs. J. H. Mead.
Beat four ounces butter to a cream; stir in one-quarter ounce brown sugar; add the yolk of one egg and one gill of wine; put it on the stove, stirring all the time till it simmers. Grate nutmeg over it before sending to table.
A stirred wine sauce for boiled or steamed puddings, closer to a sabayon than to the hard sauces that share its era. The whole thing takes five minutes and lives or dies on heat control.
- Do not let it boilOne egg yolk in a butter-and-wine emulsion will scramble the moment it goes past a bare simmer. Use the lowest heat or a bowl over hot water, stir constantly, and pull it off as soon as it thickens and coats the spoon.
- A gillHalf a cup in North American measure, five fluid ounces in British. Either works here; the British gill gives a thinner, more pourable sauce.
- The sugar looks wrongThe sugar looks low -- A quarter ounce of brown sugar is only a teaspoon or two, which will barely sweeten four ounces of butter and a gill of wine. It may be a misprint for a quarter pound, but the text as printed says ounce and there is no way to confirm the intent. Sweeten to taste and note that you are departing from the page.
- ButterFour ounces is one US stick. Have it genuinely soft so it creams rather than melts into a greasy layer.
- Which wineIn pudding sauces of this period an unspecified 'wine' was usually a fortified one: sherry, madeira or port rather than table wine. Sherry is the safest choice; a dry white will taste thin and sour against the butter.
- NutmegGrate it at the table or just before serving. Pre-ground nutmeg has lost most of what makes this finish worth doing.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup, enough for four to six servings spooned over a steamed or boiled pudding. Serve it hot; it stiffens as it cools and does not reheat well without splitting.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 from contributed recipes and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, which makes it one of the earliest Canadian examples of the charity cookbook — a genre that would dominate North American home cooking for the next century. Contributors were credited by name, as "Mrs. J. H. Mead" is here. The word "French" attached to a pudding sauce in this period generally signalled refinement rather than any French origin, distinguishing an egg-thickened, wine-enriched sauce from the plain creamed butter-and-sugar hard sauce that was the everyday standard. The technique itself belongs to the sabayon family, where yolk, sugar and fortified wine are worked over gentle heat, and similar wine sauces appear in English cookery books before this one.