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Wine Pudding Sauce
One cup of sugar, one-half cup butter, one-half cup of wine, one egg; beat butter, sugar, and eggs together; set it on the stove and heat, pour in the wine, add a little nutmeg; pour from one dish to another a few times, and send to the table.
A hot foamy sauce for boiled and steamed puddings, of the type that stands or falls on temperature control. Read the heating note first.
- Gentle heat, not the burner"Set it on the stove and heat" assumes a cooler spot on a wood range. Use a double boiler or a bowl over barely simmering water and whisk constantly; on direct heat the single egg scrambles in seconds and the butter breaks out as oil.
- Bring the egg up to temperatureCook the mixture to 160F on an instant-read thermometer, which also gives the sauce the body it needs to coat a pudding. Below that you have warm raw egg in wine rather than a sauce.
- "One egg" and "eggs"The recipe lists one egg and then says to beat the "eggs." Either is workable: one egg gives a thin pouring sauce, two a thicker foam. Eggs of the period may have run smaller than a modern large egg, so one large egg is a reasonable reading of the list.
- The wineNineteenth-century pudding sauces often used sherry, madeira or a sweet port. A dry table wine will taste thin and sour against a cup of sugar. Note that the recipe pours the wine in after the mixture is already heating, not off the heat.
- Pouring from dish to dishThis is aeration, the same trick used for hot chocolate. Two warmed pitchers, poured back and forth three or four times, lighten the sauce and even out the temperature. It also cools it, so work quickly and serve at once.
- NutmegGrate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg has little to offer here and this sauce has almost nothing else in it to hide behind.
- YieldRoughly two cups, enough for six to eight servings of a steamed pudding. It does not reheat well once broken, so make it while the pudding rests.
Wine sauce was a common finish for boiled and steamed puddings through the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the period often give several versions: a hard sauce creamed cold, a cornstarch-thickened one, and this warm egg-and-butter kind, which is essentially a loose sabayon built on the same principle as zabaglione. The instruction to pour the sauce from one dish to another is an old technique for making a mixture frothy without a whisk.