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Creamy Hard Sauce
½ cup thick cream, whipped 1 teaspoon vanilla Add sugar gradually and enough cream to pour.
A hard sauce is a creamed butter-and-sugar paste served cold on hot pudding, and this version lightens it with whipped cream. The proportions given here are incomplete, so treat the notes below as guidance on technique rather than a full ingredient list.
- Sugar is unquantifiedThe direction to "add sugar gradually" gives no amount, and no butter quantity survives in the text either. Recipes for hard sauce vary widely, from about equal parts sugar and butter to two or three parts sugar; work by taste and texture rather than guessing at a figure the original never supplied.
- "Thick cream"In older books thick cream means the rich cream skimmed from the top of the bottle, fat enough to whip. Modern heavy whipping cream is the nearest equivalent; light cream or half-and-half will not hold a whip.
- Powdered, not granulatedFor any sauce beaten cold, confectioners' or superfine sugar is the safer choice. Granulated sugar dissolves poorly in butter and cream at room temperature and can leave the sauce gritty.
- Fold, do not beatThe recipe calls for the cream to be whipped first. If it is being folded into a creamed base, fold at the end rather than beating with a mixer, which knocks the air out.
- Serving temperature is the hingeHard sauce is meant to be cold and firm so that it melts on contact with hot pudding. Chill it at least an hour, and keep it refrigerated until the pudding leaves the oven.
- "Enough cream to pour"This phrase sits oddly with the name, since hard sauce usually mounds on a spoon. Taken at face value the direction produces a thinned, pouring sauce that will not set firm and behaves more like a sweetened cream.
Hard sauce is generally said to take its name from its consistency rather than its flavour: unlike the warm "soft" sauces poured from a boat, it is a cold, firm paste of butter and sugar that softens only when it meets a hot pudding. British cooks generally know the same thing as brandy or rum butter, and it is the customary partner to plum pudding, steamed fruit puddings and mince pie. The creamy variant here belongs to the early twentieth-century American habit of folding whipped cream into older confections to lighten them, a change made practical once bottled cream with a thick top layer was a reliable household purchase. Company cookbooks such as this one, distributed by insurance and utility firms, tended to collect several versions of a staple sauce side by side.