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Butterless Sauce
Place one half a gill of milk in a pan in boiling water; when scalding put in half a pint of powdered sugar mixed with the yolks of two eggs, stir until thick as boiled custard, take off; when cool add flavoring. Just before serving mix the well-beaten whites lightly with the sauce.
A pudding sauce built on a thin stirred custard, lightened at the last moment with beaten whites. The name is the point: it stands in for the butter-and-sugar hard sauce that dominated Victorian dessert tables.
- The whites are never cookedThe yolks are cooked to custard stage, but the beaten whites go in raw just before serving and stay raw. Use pasteurized eggs or pasteurized carton whites, keep the sauce cold until the moment it is served, and skip it entirely for anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
- Half a gillA gill is a quarter-pint, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (60 ml) of milk. That is all the liquid in the recipe; the sauce gets its body from the yolks and sugar, not from the milk.
- Half a pint of powdered sugarSugar here is measured by volume, not weight: a half-pint is one cup. Modern confectioners' sugar runs about 4 oz / 115 g to the cup and contains a little cornstarch; the 'powdered sugar' of the period was more often finely ground granulated, which weighs considerably more to the cup. Any thickening effect from the cornstarch is slight.
- "In a pan in boiling water"This is a double boiler. Set a bowl over barely simmering water, not a hard boil, and keep the bottom clear of the water; direct or over-hot heat scrambles a yolk custard this thin in seconds.
- How thick, and how hot"Thick as boiled custard" means coating the back of a spoon, around 170-175F (77-80C). Pull it off the heat while it still flows and strain it if any grain has formed.
- FlavoringThe book assumes the cook knows what she wants: a teaspoon of vanilla, a grating of nutmeg, or a tablespoon of sherry, brandy or rosewater. Add it once the custard is cool, since heat drives off both alcohol and vanilla.
- Folding the whitesThe recipe calls for well-beaten whites mixed in lightly; fold with a spatula in a few strokes. Stirred in too hard, they can weep and the sauce separate into foam over liquid.
- Yield and servingRoughly a cup and a half once lightened. It is meant to be spooned cold or barely cool over hot steamed or boiled pudding, apple dumplings or plain cake, and the recipe directs that the whites go in just before serving, as the foam does not hold.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) gives a whole battery of pudding sauces, most of them creamed butter and sugar with wine or fruit juice beaten in — what Americans called hard sauce. A butterless version had obvious appeal in a farm household where butter was a cash product to be sold or traded rather than eaten by the cup. The technique itself is the old crème anglaise stretched as far as it will go: a quarter-cup of milk, two yolks and a great deal of sugar, then aerated with the whites so it goes further still.