Quoting Dave Drum to Jim Weller <=-

I'd probably make the hard sauce without the brandy tho.

The alcohol cooks out.

Not really, if you add it in AFTER the five minute boil.

Quibbles.

Not at all. She doesn't want any alcohol in her food.

But that recipe calls for eight cups of ingredients so it's more
like eight servings

The hard sauce calls for *MUCH* less than 8 cups.

The PUDDING contains eight cups of ingredients, so eight generous
helpings worth. So the one cup and a bit of sauce would be split
eight ways, roughly two tablespoons per serving.

A proper hard sauce does not have corn starch and a lot of water
in it or get boiled.

So saith cooking guru Weller.

No. Saith every English chef and cookbook writer for the past two
hundred years.

It's an ancient dish, probably made shortly after the invention
of distilled spirits but it certainly dates back to at least 1714
and King George the First's Christmas dinner menu which was much
written about at the time.

The ingredients are quite codified by now. As a matter of fact when
Great Britain was in the EU their food regulations did codify it
formally. Among other things the final product must contain at
least 20% butterfat to qualify.

Hard sauce is actually a flavoured sweetened butter.

There are plenty of other sweet dessert sauces that are made with water
and thickened with starch or flour but they are a different thing
altogether. Hard sauce by definition is hard, not syrupy, at room
temperature. It's right there in the name.

I have collected 23 hard sauce recipes over the decades from a
number of sources and none of them have any starch in them, or
more than a teaspoon or two of water, if any, and none of them
involve heating or cooking.

Your sweet starchy syrup may be tasty but it is not hard sauce.


Cheers

Jim


... Sweet cornbread is called cake.

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JIM WELLER wrote to DAVE DRUM <=-

There are plenty of other sweet dessert sauces that are made with water and thickened with starch or flour but they are a different thing altogether. Hard sauce by definition is hard, not syrupy, at room temperature. It's right there in the name.

I have collected 23 hard sauce recipes over the decades from a
number of sources and none of them have any starch in them, or
more than a teaspoon or two of water, if any, and none of them
involve heating or cooking.

It's what my grandmother called "hard sauce". When I asked (at around
seven or eight years old) she told me it was called hard sauce because
of the hard liquor used in it. Her sauce was not hard when cold - just
somewhat thicker than when warmed.

As the twig is bent .........

... Sweet cornbread is called cake.

HUH?!?!?!?

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.06

Title: Old School Johnny Cake
Categories: Five, Breads
Yield: 6 Servings

1 ts Salt
1/2 c White corn meal
1 c Scalded milk

Mix the salt and cornmeal. Stir in gradually the scalded
milk. Spread in a buttered 8" X 8" shallow pan. Dot with
bits of butter.

Bake at 350ºF/175ºC until crisp on top.

FROM: The Fanny Farmer Cookbook. 1942 edition.

Recipe from: http://www.recipelink.com

Uncle Dirty Dave's Archives

MMMMM

... "Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form" - Karl
arx
--- MultiMail/Win v0.52
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Quoting Dave Drum to Jim Weller <=-

it was called hard sauce because of the hard liquor used in it.

Well, uh, okay.

Her sauce was not hard when cold - just somewhat thicker than
when warmed.

My mom made a sauce much like that too, but with flour, for
Christmas time plum puddings. She called it simply "pudding sauce".

The real thing, like the one in your second recipe, can be molded
and shaped for fancy presentations.

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.06

Title: John Nott's Mother's Plum Pudding
Categories: Pudding, Holiday, Heirloom, Jw, Tnt
Yield: 1 Pudding

1 lb Raisins; stoned
1 lb Currants; cleaned
1 lb Brown sugar
1 lb Suet; chopped fine
1 lb Bread crumbs; fine
1 lb [?] mixed citron, lemon and
-orange peel; cut fine [how
-much?]
1 Nutmeg
12 Eggs
2 Or 3 large handfuls of flour
1/2 Teacup of good liquor
Sauce:
1 c Brown sugar
1 c Butter
Yolk of one egg
1 Wineglass of good liquor

Break in 12 eggs and mix all well, stirring a good while and adding 2
or 3 large handfuls of flour and a half a teacup of good liquor.
Scald your cloth and flour it well. Tie the pudding pretty tight. It
does not swell much. Boil six hours.

Sauce: beat the butter and sugar to a cream and stir in the yolk. Put
it on top of the stove to simmer but do not let it boil. Pour in a
wine glass of good liquor and serve hot.

John Nott's mother is my maternal grandfather's first wife. This
recipe was given to my mother by her half-brother John around 1946
and recorded in her personal recipe book word for word.

Jim Weller

MMMMM

Cheers

Jim

... I said "big" instead of "grande" at Starbucks once ...
... They dragged me out behind the store's dumpster and beat me up.

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