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Hard Sauce
Place in a cold bowl one ounce good butter, tow ounces fine sugar, half saltspoon ground mace, and five drops vanilla essence. Set the bowl on broken ice and sharply beat up with a wooden spoon for five minutes; then keep in a cool place till required.
A very small batch of the creamed butter-and-sugar sauce served with steamed puddings. The whole thing takes five minutes and hinges on keeping everything cold.
- Quantities and yieldOne ounce of butter (2 tablespoons) and two ounces of sugar (a scant 1/3 cup) give only a small quantity of sauce — enough for about two servings. Multiply by four to six for a family-sized pudding.
- "Tow ounces"A typesetting slip for "two ounces." A butter-to-sugar ratio of roughly one to two by weight is common in hard sauce, and the undissolved sugar gives the granular, slightly crunchy body.
- Fine sugarThis means a finely ground sugar — caster or superfine, or finely powdered — rather than coarse granulated, which stays gritty in cold butter. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and makes the sauce pasty. Pulse granulated sugar briefly in a spice grinder if you have no caster.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. Ground mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed — warmer and lighter than nutmeg itself, and worth buying rather than substituting if you want the period flavour.
- Vanilla essenceFive drops is only about 1/16 teaspoon. The strength of commercial essences varied a good deal, so adjust to taste.
- The ice bathThe point of setting the bowl on broken ice is that the butter must stay firm while it is beaten, so the sauce holds its shape rather than creaming into a soft frosting. A metal bowl nested in a larger bowl of ice water does the same job. Do not soften the butter first — start with it cold and workable, straight from the refrigerator for a few minutes.
- BeatingFive minutes with a wooden spoon is a genuine workout; a stand mixer on medium does it in two to three. Stop when the mixture is pale and no longer looks like separate butter and sugar.
- ServingChill until firm, then serve in a mound or cut in slices onto hot pudding, where it melts into a sauce. It keeps a week refrigerated and freezes well.
Hard sauce takes its name simply from its state: firm and cuttable, as opposed to the poured "soft" or liquid sauces served over the same puddings. In Britain the same mixture is better known by the spirit added to it — brandy butter for Christmas pudding, rum butter in Cumberland, where it was also traditionally given to visitors calling on a new baby. This version omits the spirits, flavoured with mace and vanilla instead. Its appearance in a general international collection reflects how firmly steamed and boiled puddings still held the dessert course: a book of this kind needed a standard sauce to go with the puddings printed elsewhere in it, and hard sauce, needing no cooking and keeping for days in a cold larder, was the most practical of them.