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Sauce for Plum Pudding
Use equal quantities of butter and sugar. Cream the butter until very light, add the sugar, beat until very light. Add then the beaten yolk of an egg and a dash of grated nutmeg. Heat a large glass of sherry wine with a tablespoonful of water, when just beginning to boil, stir it in the butter and sugar. Brandy, sherry or lemon juice may be used according to fancy and circumstances. {
This is a creamed butter sauce in the hard-sauce family, loosened at the last moment with hot wine. The hinge is temperature: everything depends on adding the hot liquid slowly enough that the butter emulsion holds instead of breaking into a greasy puddle.
- Quantities to start fromThe recipe gives only proportions, and does not say whether by weight or by volume. Half a cup each of butter and sugar (about 4 oz of butter, somewhat less by weight of sugar) with one yolk and about a quarter cup of sherry makes enough for six to eight servings of pudding. Use unsalted butter, thoroughly softened, and superfine or sifted confectioners' sugar so it dissolves rather than grits.
- "A large glass of sherry"Genuinely ambiguous. A wine glass in period measure is usually reckoned at two fluid ounces, but "large glass" was left to the cook's judgment and could mean twice that. Start with two ounces, taste, and add more; too much liquid will thin the sauce past holding.
- Adding the hot wineHeat the sherry only to the first shiver of a boil, then pour it into the creamed mixture in a thin stream while beating hard. Dumped in at once it melts the butter and the sauce separates. If it does split, beating in a spoonful of cold creamed butter will often bring it back.
- The egg yolkOne yolk is stirred in raw and is not brought to a safe temperature by the hot wine, which is too small a quantity to cook it. Use a pasteurized egg, and do not serve to anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised. The sauce is perfectly good made without the yolk, just less rich.
- NutmegGrate it fresh from the whole nut. Pre-ground nutmeg loses aroma as its volatile oil disperses and will read as dusty rather than warm.
- The lemon variantIf lemon juice replaces the wine, do not heat it; two tablespoons of juice with a little grated zest beaten cold into the butter and sugar gives the sharper sauce that suits a very rich pudding.
- Timing and servingThis sauce is at its best made minutes before it goes to the table, while still warm and foamy. It will not hold on a hotplate. If it must wait, keep it over barely warm water and rewhisk before serving.
Sauces of creamed butter and sugar have accompanied English plum pudding since at least the nineteenth century, under names that shift with the binder: hard sauce when it is left stiff and chilled, brandy butter, which is a later term still, when the spirit is beaten in cold, and wine sauce when it is slackened with hot sherry or Madeira as here. The plum pudding itself, boiled in a cloth and later a basin, was a fixture of the Anglo-American Christmas table, and a rich sauce was considered essential to it, the pudding being dense, dark and comparatively dry. The instruction that "brandy, sherry or lemon juice may be used according to fancy and circumstances" is a small piece of period tact: cookbooks of the era were written for households that kept spirits and households that did not, though the phrase may equally suggest simply what was to hand.