WordNet
n. butter and sugar creamed together with brandy or other flavoring and served with rich puddings
Wikipedia
Hard sauce is a sweet, rich dessert sauce made by creaming or beating butter and sugar with rum (rum butter), brandy (brandy butter), whiskey, sherry (sherry butter), vanilla or other flavorings. It is served cold, often with hot desserts.
It is typically served with plum pudding, bread pudding, Indian pudding, hasty pudding, and other heavy puddings as well as with fruitcakes and gingerbread.
In the U.K. brandy butter is particularly associated with the Christmas and New Year season and Christmas pudding and warm mince pies, serving as a seasonal alternative to cream, ice cream or custard. At Cambridge, it is also known as Senior Wrangler sauce.
Though it is called a sauce, it is neither a liquid nor smooth. It could be more accurately classified as a spread and has the consistency of butter. It is easy to make and keeps for months under refrigeration. It can be pressed into a decorative mold before chilling.
Under European Community regulations, to be called rum/brandy/sherry butter, it must contain at least 20% butterfat.
Usage examples of "hard sauce".
Reggie and Bonnie Sawyer are having a rib roast of beef, frozen corn, french-fried potatoes, and for dessert a chocolate bread pudding with hard sauce.
Then there was frozen custard and raisin pudding with hard sauce and Malaga and Thompson grapes and more strawberries with powdered sugar.
It was a skimpy supper but I ended it with a substantial dessert I could make with what I had on hand, plus two cooking apples picked up cheap that morning from my huckster: apple dumplings with hard sauce.
At the long table, dishes came and came: smoked eel, broiled turbot, veal and ham pie, quails stuffed with chestnuts, stargazy pie, capons stuffed with onions and oysters, a great smoking round of roast beef flanked by roast parsnips and potatoes and carrots, brandied plum pudding with candied peel and hard sauce, and finally a whole wheel of Stilton cheese.
Halleck had put away his usual lumberjack's meal -three hamburgers (with buns and fixin's), four ears of corn (with butter), half a pint of french fries, and two helpings of peach cobbler with hard sauce.
To top it all off, Chow brought on a huge, steaming plum pudding with hard sauce.