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Pudding Sauce (III)
Mrs. A. R. Scranton.
Four tablespoons of white sugar, two tablespoons of butter, one tablespoon of flour; beat all to a cream and add the white of one egg well beaten ; then add one gill boiling water; stir well; flavour to taste.
A foam-style pudding sauce of the kind spooned over steamed or boiled puddings. It is essentially a hard sauce lightened with beaten egg white and loosened with hot water, and it comes together in about five minutes.
- The hinge: add the water in a thin streamPour the boiling water in slowly while beating hard. Dumped in at once it melts the butter into a slick and collapses the egg white, and the sauce separates into greasy liquid and froth.
- A gillAbout half a cup; four fluid ounces by US reckoning, five if the imperial quarter-pint is meant, as it may well be in a Toronto book. Either way it is a generous amount of liquid for this quantity of butter and sugar, so expect a pourable sauce rather than a spoonable one.
- "Beat all to a cream"The receipt creams sugar, butter and flour together; if you prefer, cream the butter and sugar until pale first and then work in the flour. Butter for creaming should be soft, around 65F; straight from the fridge it will stay in lumps that never disperse.
- The flour stays rawOne tablespoon of flour will not cook through in a splash of boiling water, and it thickens very little. Setting the finished sauce over a pan of simmering water for two or three minutes, stirring, cooks out the pasty taste and gives it body.
- The egg whiteThe beaten white goes in before the boiling water is poured on, so it is warmed at best, never brought to a safe temperature. Use a pasteurized white if the sauce is going to anyone very young, elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, and make it just before serving rather than holding it.
- "Flavour to taste"Grated nutmeg, lemon zest and juice, vanilla, or a tablespoon of sherry, brandy or rum are all plausible choices for the period. Add spirits at the end, off the heat, so they are not driven off.
- YieldRoughly a cup, enough for four modest servings of pudding. It does not reheat or keep, and the foam sinks fairly quickly, so serve it at once.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled by ladies of Toronto and other cities and towns and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, and it is usually counted among the earliest Canadian community cookbooks of its kind, following the American charity-cookbook model that spread after the Civil War fundraising fairs. The signed attributions are the point of the genre: each contributor put her name to her own receipt, which may be why the book carries three different pudding sauces in a row rather than one editorial standard. Sauces like this one existed because the boiled and steamed puddings that anchored a Victorian dinner were dense and plain by design, and the sauce supplied the sugar, the fat and the flavouring; the same creamed butter and sugar served cold as hard sauce, warmed and thinned as this one, or beaten with cream for a richer table.