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Foamy Sauce (Nutmeg cup thin hot cream)
Nutmeg. 3/4 cup thin hot cream. 1 tablespoon Sherry Wine.
PROCESS: Beat the whites of eggs until stiff, add sugar gradually, beating constantly. Add hot cream slowly, continue beating. Add Sherry wine and a sprinkle of nutmeg. Milk may be used in place of cream, if the latter is not available.
This is a dessert sauce for hot puddings, and it is printed here in truncated form — the header carries only the nutmeg, cream and sherry, while the egg whites and sugar called for in the process never got their quantities. More importantly, the method never brings the eggs to a safe temperature.
- Why it failsThree-quarters of a cup of hot cream beaten slowly into a bowl of stiff egg whites cannot pasteurize them. The foam is a poor conductor, the cream loses heat the moment it hits the bowl, and the mixture is served without further cooking. The whites are effectively raw.
- Raw white, not raw yolkEgg-white sauces are sometimes assumed to be safer than yolk-based ones. Salmonella can be present in the white as well as the yolk, and this sauce is poured over pudding and eaten immediately with no holding step that would help.
- The missing amountsThe ingredient line has lost the number of eggs and the quantity of sugar. Comparable foamy sauces of the period run to two or three whites and about half a cup of powdered sugar, but that is inference, not what the book says. The recipe as printed is not complete enough to follow.
- What to do insteadUse a current recipe for a cooked foamy or sabayon-style sauce, where the egg is brought up over a water bath to a measured temperature. Do not adapt this one.
- "Thin cream"In American books of this period thin cream is light or coffee cream, roughly 18 to 20 percent fat, as against "thick" or heavy cream at 36 percent and up. The note that milk may be substituted tells you the cream is here for richness rather than structure.
- NutmegBest grated fresh from the whole nut. Pre-ground nutmeg loses its volatile oils quickly and tastes flat and woody by comparison.
Foamy sauce belonged to the standing repertoire of American pudding sauces, alongside hard sauce, lemon sauce and plain sweetened cream — beaten to a froth, faintly alcoholic, spooned over a steamed or cottage pudding so that it slumped and melted against the heat. Its ancestry is generally traced to sabayon and zabaglione, the whipped wine-and-egg sauces of France and Italy, though the American version leans on egg white and cream rather than yolk alone, which makes it lighter, whiter and cheaper.