Golden Sauce
1 egg. 1 cup powdered sugar. 3 tablespoons Sherry wine.
PROCESS: Beat yolks until thick and light, add one-half the sugar gradually, beating constantly: beat whites until stiff, gradually adding the remaining half cup sugar. Combine mixtures, add wine and beat thoroughly. 1/3 cup Cottolene. 1½ cups fine sugar. 3/4 cup cold water.
The page as printed is both corrupted and unsafe: the egg-foam sauce is never cooked, and the ingredient list has run together with a second, unrelated preparation. The notes below explain what is on the page rather than how to rebuild it.
- Raw eggs, never heatedSeparated yolks and whites are beaten with sugar and wine and served as is. Nothing in the method brings the eggs to a temperature that would kill Salmonella. A current recipe, cooked over water to a measured temperature or built on pasteurized eggs, should be used instead.
- Sherry is not a safeguardThree tablespoons of fortified wine in a cup of foam gives an alcohol level far too low to make raw egg safe.
- The quantities are unusableNo number of eggs is given, yet the method calls for both yolks and whites. What survives on the page is a fragment, not a shorthand a modern cook can decode.
- Two recipes on one lineThe last three items -- Cottolene, fine sugar, cold water -- belong to a different preparation that has been set into the same block. They have no place in an egg-and-wine sauce and no method attached to them.
- CottoleneA branded shortening of cottonseed oil and beef suet, heavily advertised in the 1890s and long discontinued. It appears constantly in this book because the publisher's sponsor made it; modern shortening or butter is the general equivalent, though not here.
- Powdered versus fine sugar"Powdered sugar" in this period generally meant a finely ground granulated or loaf sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. What "fine sugar" denotes in the second fragment cannot be determined, as no method accompanies it.
Golden sauce belongs to the family of sweet foam sauces -- sabayon, zabaglione, and the English "wine sauce" -- that were poured warm or cold over steamed puddings, and it was a standard finish for the heavy boiled and baked puddings that closed a Sunday dinner. Cookbooks of the period seem to have printed a good many variants, some cooked over hot water and some, like this one, simply beaten cold, at a time when the risks of uncooked eggs were presumably less widely appreciated in the household kitchen. 52 Sunday Dinners was published as promotional literature for Cottolene, the cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which explains why that brand name turns up in ingredient lists throughout the book -- including, by evident accident of typesetting, in the middle of a sauce that does not use it.