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French Pudding Sauce
Beat together with a whip the yolks of four eggs, a cupful of powdered sugar. The saucepan containing the eggs and sugar should set on the stove and the beating should be rapid for about three minutes. At the end of this time, while the beating is continued, a cupful of madeira or sherry should be slowly added. If sherry is used, season with the juice of a half of a small lemon. The moment the wine is all poured in, take the sauce from the stove, but continue beating it for a few moments longer. It should be smooth, but thick.
This is a sabayon — a foaming wine custard — under a French name, and it hangs entirely on heat control. Everything else is a matter of a bowl, a whisk and patience.
- Use a double boilerThe recipe simply says "The saucepan containing the eggs and sugar should set on the stove," which on a modern direct burner will scramble the yolks. Set a metal bowl over barely simmering water, not touching it, and lift it off the moment it thickens.
- Powdered sugarIn nineteenth-century American usage this generally meant ordinary granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar dissolves fastest and is the closest match; granulated works with a little more whisking.
- CupfulTake it as 8 fl oz. Four yolks to a cup of sugar and a cup of fortified wine is a high ratio of liquid to egg, though the recipe still expects the finished sauce to be "smooth, but thick."
- Add the wine slowlyThe recipe is explicit that the wine goes in slowly while the beating continues. Pour it in a thin stream, whisking without pause, rather than tipping the cupful in at once.
- DonenessThree minutes is a guide, not a rule. Cook until the sauce coats the whisk and reaches 160F on an instant-read thermometer, which both sets the custard and takes the yolks out of the salmonella range.
- Which wineMadeira tends to the nuttier and sweeter; sherry varies widely by style. The recipe attaches the lemon juice to the sherry version only, without saying why. A medium sherry such as amontillado will suit better than a cream sherry.
- Yield and servingAbout two cups — enough for six to eight servings. Serve warm, spooned over a plain steamed or boiled pudding, sponge cake or poached fruit. It will slacken and weep if held, so make it just before the pudding leaves the mould.
- If it splitsPull the bowl off the heat at once and whisk hard off the heat; a tablespoon of cold wine or cream whisked in will often bring it back. Once it has gone visibly grainy, it will not recover.
This is the Anglo-American household version of Italian zabaglione, which travelled into French cookery as sabayon and from there into English and American books as "wine sauce" or, as here, "French pudding sauce" — the French label often taken to carry prestige rather than to describe an origin. Late nineteenth-century American cookbooks devote whole chapters to pudding sauces because boiled and steamed puddings were still everyday desserts, and a plain suet or bread pudding depended on its sauce for interest; the range ran from hard sauce, through simple sugar-and-butter mixtures, up to enriched wine custards like this one for company. That Madeira and sherry are given as equals suggests both were familiar enough on the American sideboard to be kept for cooking as much as for drinking. The technique itself is older than the name: beating yolks, sugar and wine over gentle heat appears in Italian sources long before it was formalised as a French sauce, and it is the direct ancestor of the modern dessert sabayon.