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White Sauce (May be made with the whites)
White sauce may be made with the whites of two unbeaten eggs, and one cupful of white sugar, beaten together; add a teaspoonful of white wine vinegar or other light-colored vinegar; beat well; just before carrying to the table, add two-thirds of a cupful of cream and a tablespoonful of wine.
This is a hard sauce for puddings built on raw, unbeaten egg whites that are never heated at any stage. The points below explain why that construction is no longer acceptable rather than how to rescue it.
- The eggs are never cookedSugar is beaten into raw whites, vinegar and wine are stirred in, and the sauce goes to the table cold. Nothing in the method brings the egg to 160F, the temperature at which Salmonella in egg is reliably killed.
- Sugar and acid are not a substitute for heatA teaspoonful of vinegar and a tablespoonful of wine in roughly a cup and a half of finished sauce leave the pH and alcohol content far too high to inactivate pathogens. Curing by acid requires much stronger concentrations and long holding times, neither of which applies here.
- Cream added at the last minuteThe two-thirds cupful of cream goes in "just before carrying to the table," so the finished sauce is held unrefrigerated until served. Raw egg white combined with uncooked cream and held at room temperature is a poor holding condition.
- Who it was served toPudding sauces of this kind may well have reached children, invalids and the elderly, though this recipe says nothing about who it was intended for. Those are among the groups for whom raw-egg dishes carry the greatest consequence today.
- If you want a sauce like thisUse a current recipe: either a cooked meringue-based sauce brought to temperature over water, or one built on pasteurised egg white sold for the purpose. Both give the same pale, foamy result by a route that can be verified.
- Reading the original unitsFor context while reading rather than for making: a cupful in an American book of this period is usually taken as about 8 fl oz, though cup measures were not standardised. The call for "white wine vinegar or other light-colored vinegar" most likely serves to keep the sauce pale.
Nineteenth-century American pudding sauces divide roughly into two families: the cooked custard sort, stirred over water until it thickens, and the uncooked "foam" or "cream" sauces built by beating sugar into raw egg with a spoonful of wine or spirit for flavour. This belongs to the second family, and its relatives are the hard sauces and wine sauces that accompanied steamed and boiled puddings through the Victorian period. The acid may be doing more than flavouring: a little acid helps sugar-laden whites hold volume, the same principle behind the cream of tartar in a modern meringue, and the call for a pale vinegar suggests a concern that the sauce stay white. That a household book could print a raw-egg sauce without comment is unremarkable for the period: the connection between poultry, eggs and Salmonella was not established until well into the twentieth century.