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Pudding Sauce (Beat the yolks of three eggs)
Beat the yolks of three eggs into one cup of sugar; add one cupful of cream and the juice of three lemons, and the rind of one.
This is an uncooked lemon-and-cream sauce built on raw egg yolks, and nothing in the method ever brings them to a safe temperature. The notes below explain the problem and decode the period measurements; they are not a route to making it.
- The yolks are never cookedThree raw yolks are beaten with sugar, cream and juice and served as-is over pudding. There is no heating step at any point, so any Salmonella present in the shell eggs survives into the finished sauce. A cooked custard sauce from a current source should be used instead.
- Lemon juice is not a substitute for heatAcid will denature egg protein to some degree, changing the texture and appearance of the yolks. That is a texture change, not a kill step, and it does not make raw egg safe.
- The cream compounds itA cup of cream held at room temperature with sugar and no cooking is also an issue. A sauce like this left standing on a sideboard is a poor bet even setting the eggs aside.
- "One cupful" is roughly today's cupA cup in cookbooks of this period is usually close to 8 fl oz, though not yet rigidly standardised, so the proportions read as 3 yolks to about a cup of sugar by volume and a cup of cream. The sugar is a full cup, not a scant one.
- Three lemons is a wide rangeLemon size varies, and three of them might yield anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 cup of juice. The recipe gives no target volume, so the sharpness of the result was never fixed.
- The rind"The rind of one" is best read as the yellow zest only, grated or pared thin, not the white pith. Commercial waxing of citrus is a later practice than this recipe, so modern fruit is best scrubbed or bought unwaxed.
Pudding sauces occupy a page or two in many American household cookbooks of the late nineteenth century, alongside puddings — steamed, boiled, baked in a dish — that were plain by design. They divide roughly into hard sauces creamed from butter and sugar, cooked sauces thickened with flour or cornstarch, and uncooked "foam" or "cream" sauces, of which this is one. The absence of any cooking is not necessarily carelessness on the compiler's part, since the specific risks of raw egg were not then understood; the same assumption underlies period recipes for eggnog and uncooked mayonnaise.