A pudding needs a partner
Few British food arguments are more pleasantly intractable than this one. Brandy butter, proper custard, or cream — each has passionate advocates, each does something genuinely different to a hot slice of Christmas pudding, and most households have quietly decided the matter decades ago. The pudding itself is covered separately; here we are interested in what goes on top.
Brandy butter: the classic hard sauce
Brandy butter is also known, particularly in older recipe books, as hard sauce — a name that describes it better. It is butter creamed with sugar and brandy until pale, then set in the refrigerator until firm. The point becomes clear the moment it meets a hot pudding: the cold, dense mass melts slowly into rivulets of boozy, sweet richness rather than pooling instantly into a liquid. That controlled melt is the thing. No other sauce does it.
The ratio of butter to sugar to brandy varies from kitchen to kitchen, and this is as it should be. Some prefer it very sweet, almost fudge-like; others want the brandy forward and the sugar restrained. What matters is that the butter is properly creamed — not softened and stirred, but beaten until genuinely light — so the result is airy enough to melt evenly rather than sitting in a solid lump.
One practical virtue brandy butter has over its rivals: it can be made several days in advance, covered, and kept in the refrigerator without any loss of quality. For anyone navigating Christmas Day logistics, that matters. It also freezes well, though the texture is best straight from the fridge rather than the freezer.
Rum butter is brandy butter's Cumbrian cousin, with its own distinct character — covered in a separate piece. The principle is identical, but dark rum replaces brandy, and the result tends to be darker, slightly more treacly, and strongly associated with Cumberland and the Lake District rather than the Christmas table at large.
Proper custard: the egg-yolk case
A real pouring custard — made by warming egg yolks with sugar, adding hot milk or cream, and stirring patiently until the mixture thickens — is a different proposition entirely. It is warm and yielding. Where brandy butter punctuates the pudding with cold richness, custard wraps it. The two are not interchangeable, which is perhaps why some people serve both.
The egg yolk is the active ingredient: it contains proteins that thicken gradually as heat is applied, giving custard its body without any starch or setting agent. Get the heat too high and those proteins overcook, producing the scrambled texture that haunts every custard-maker's nightmares. Proper custard requires attention; it cannot simply be left on the hob.
Custard powder changed all of that. Invented in the nineteenth century by Alfred Bird — reportedly because his wife could not eat eggs — it uses cornflour as the thickening agent, coloured and flavoured to approximate the real thing. The result is more stable and more forgiving. Depending on your upbringing, it is either a perfectly acceptable alternative or a rather flat substitute. Both have their place, and neither camp should be too snobbish about it.
Cream: the simplest argument
Cream is not one thing. Britain produces an unusually wide range of cream styles — from thin single cream to the extraordinary stiffness of clotted — and the choice matters. We have written about British creams in more detail elsewhere, but for Christmas pudding the main contenders are double cream (thick enough to pour slowly, rich enough to stand up to the pudding's intensity), lightly whipped cream (which adds air and lightness), and clotted cream (which behaves almost like brandy butter in its density, without the alcohol or sweetness).
Plain cream makes no claim to complexity. It is cold, it is rich, and it cuts through the dark, fruited weight of the pudding without competing with it. For anyone who finds brandy butter too sweet or custard too demanding, good double cream is a quietly confident choice.
How to choose — or not choose
These three sauces are not really in competition. Brandy butter is the most specifically Christmas thing, with its boozy coldness and slow melt. Custard is the most comforting, the warmest, the one most likely to prompt genuine nostalgia. Cream is the most versatile and the least fussy.
Plenty of Christmas tables put out two, or all three, and leave the decision to the individual plate. Given that a Christmas pudding — dense, dark, months in the making — is already an exercise in abundance, rationing the accompaniments seems to miss the point entirely.
