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Pudding Sauce (IV)
Mrs. R. Beaty.
One cup of milk, one teaspoonful butter, one egg, onehalf cup pulverized sugar, one glass wine, nutmeg, one teaspoonful corn starch; beat sugar and butter together well; beat the egg well, and mix. Boil the milk and corn starch, and mix all together before bringing to table.
A thin pouring sauce for steamed or boiled pudding, thickened with cornstarch and egg rather than cooked as a true custard. The order of operations is everything here.
- The hinge: temper the eggThe beaten egg, sugar and butter go into the hot milk, not the reverse. Whisk a little of the boiling milk into the egg mixture first, then return it all to the pan over low heat and stir until it thickens slightly. If you dump the egg in at once you get sweet scrambled egg suspended in wine.
- Cook it to a safe temperatureThe original says only to "mix all together before bringing to table," which may not carry the egg high enough. Hold the finished sauce at 160F for a moment while stirring; it will coat a spoon and still pour.
- One glass wineA wine glass in this period is roughly 2 fluid ounces, or a scant quarter cup. Sherry, madeira or a sweet marsala suits it; add the wine off the heat so the aroma survives.
- Pulverized sugarFinely ground sugar with no additives — modern superfine (caster) sugar is the match. Confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will push the sauce toward paste, since there is already cornstarch in the recipe.
- The cornstarchDo not tip dry cornstarch into boiling milk. Slake the teaspoon in a tablespoon of the cold milk, then stir it into the rest as it heats, and let it bubble a full minute so it loses the raw starch taste.
- A teaspoonful of butterAbout a sixth of an ounce, a third of a tablespoon. It is there for gloss, not richness; stirred in at the end it gives the sauce a shine.
- NutmegNo quantity given. Grate it fresh over the finished sauce — a few rasps, perhaps an eighth of a teaspoon — rather than stirring in pre-ground nutmeg, which dulls quickly.
- Yield and servingMakes something over a cup and a half, enough for four to six servings of pudding. Serve warm; it thickens considerably as it cools and will need thinning with a spoonful of milk if it stands.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women — hence "Mrs. R. Beaty" attached to this one — and sold to raise money for the Home for the Friendless. The fact that this is the fourth pudding sauce in a row says something about how the period ate: a boiled or steamed pudding was the standard close to a substantial dinner, and it arrived dry, so a sweet sauce was not optional. Wine sauces of this kind — milk or water thickened lightly, enriched with egg and butter, spiked with sherry and nutmeg — belong to the English sweet-sauce tradition and sit somewhere between a stirred custard and the older hard sauce of creamed butter and sugar. Nutmeg with wine is a pairing familiar from earlier drinks such as posset, in which milk was curdled with sack or ale, and caudle, a warm spiced drink of wine or ale thickened with egg or grain.