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Wine Sauce (Brown one cup of sugar)
Brown one cup of sugar and a piece of butter the size of a hen's egg, in a sauce pan. Pour two-thirds of a teacup of boiling water slowly over the mixture; when ready to serve add one-half cup of currant wine.
This is a caramel sauce finished with fruit wine, meant for boiled or steamed puddings. The whole thing hinges on how far you take the sugar before the water goes in.
- Butter the size of a hen's eggUsually reckoned at about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons, though period cookbooks vary in what they meant by it.
- Two-thirds of a teacupTeacup measures vary between books, but taking one at roughly 6 fluid ounces makes two-thirds of one about 1/2 cup of boiling water.
- Browning the sugarThe recipe browns the sugar together with the butter; take it to the colour of an old penny, no darker. Sugar taken past that point turns bitter, and bitterness is what ruins this sauce more often than anything else.
- Adding the waterThe water must be boiling and must go in slowly. Cold water into hot caramel seizes it into a solid lump, and any water added quickly will erupt in steam. Stand back and pour down the side of the pan.
- Currant wineA homemade wine from red or black currants, common in nineteenth-century cellars and hard to find now. A ruby port, a sweet sherry, or creme de cassis loosened with a little red wine gives the same fruit-and-sweetness effect.
- When to add the wineOff the heat, at the table end of things, exactly as written. Boiling the wine cooks off the aroma that is the entire point of the sauce.
- YieldIt thickens as it cools, so keep it warm over hot water rather than reheating hard.
Wine sauce belongs to the long English line of sweet sauces for boiled and steamed puddings, where a plain suet or bread pudding was carried by whatever was poured over it. The currant wine here is the telling detail: mid-century American households with a fruit garden made small quantities of currant, elderberry and gooseberry wine as a matter of course, and such wines turn up in cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s used as a flavouring as well as a drink. That this version starts by browning the sugar and butter together rather than simply melting them gives a caramel note, and the recipe reads as a thrifty one: sugar, butter, water and a half cup of something homemade, with no eggs and no cream.