[Sca-cooks] Period gifts in jars

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Martin G. Diehl:

>I have had hard sauce flavored with rum
>-- at least I think was ... after all,
>
>     (1) I was too young to drink,
>     (2) too foolish to think of asking
>
>What recipe would be used for the baseline?

I've never used a recipe for hard sauce, but you'd cream butter with 
sugar (preferably superfine, bar sugar or confectioner's sugar), and 
just keep going until it's as sweet as you want it or... in my 
opinion, when it starts to lose its surface sheen, as will eventually 
happen with uncooked confectioner's sugar, then you should stop. 
Flavor with booze of choice. The Victorian standard, I believe, would 
be brandy, hence the alternate name for hard sauce, brandy butter.

>Same amount of scotch as rum?

Up to you. To taste. But what I was actually talking about was to 
roast crabs (something biggish like Dungeness is best), deglaze the 
pan juices with Irish or Scotch whisky (the rule is, if you're not 
willing to drink you probably shouldn't be cooking with it), then 
mount with butter as for beurre blanc. Use the butter sauce as a dip 
for the crabs... also good with lobster.

Adamantius
-- 






"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If they have no bread, you have to say, let them eat 
brioche."
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", pub 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
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Holt, 07/29/04