Foaming Sauce
Beat whites of three eggs to a stiff froth; melt tea cup of sugar in a little water, let it boil, stir in one glass wine, and then the whites of the three eggs; serve at once. -Mrs. Carrie Glazier, Chicago, Ill.
A wine-and-meringue sauce for steamed and boiled puddings. It is essentially an Italian meringue: the success or failure is in the temperature of the sugar syrup.
- The hinge: syrup temperatureThe recipe says only to let the syrup boil. Modern Italian-meringue practice is to take it to about 238-240F (soft ball) before it meets the whites; much cooler and the sauce stays loose and weeps.
- Reverse the orderModern practice is to beat the whites in a stand mixer and pour the hot syrup down the side of the bowl in a thin stream, rather than stirring whites into the pan. Adding whites to a hot pan risks scrambled threads.
- A tea cup of sugarA period tea cup is generally smaller than a modern measuring cup, often reckoned at roughly 3/4 cup. About 5 to 6 oz sugar is a reasonable reading; "a little water" is unspecified, so 2 to 3 tablespoons will do.
- A glass of wineA wineglass in period books is about 2 fl oz, a scant quarter cup. The recipe does not say which wine; sherry, madeira or a sweet white would suit. Little of the alcohol is driven off, so this is not a sauce for everyone at the table.
- When to add the wineStir it into the syrup off the heat, just before pouring. Boiling it in drives off the aroma the sauce is named for.
- Egg safetyThe hot syrup does most of the work, but the wine cools it and no temperature is measured here. If you are serving anyone vulnerable, use pasteurized egg whites.
- Serve at once means itThe foam begins to separate fairly quickly. If you must hold it, set the bowl over barely warm water and whisk again before serving.
- YieldThree whites give roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of foam, enough for six to eight servings of pudding.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) devotes a full section to pudding sauces because the puddings themselves - steamed, boiled in a cloth, or baked in a dish - were plain by design, and the sauce carried the flavor and the expense. Foaming sauce is the dressy end of that range: sugar, wine and egg white, the sugar and wine both bought, poured over something as everyday as a suet or bread pudding. The technique is the same one behind boiled frosting, and cooks of the period worked without candy thermometers, judging the syrup by eye and by how it fell from the spoon. Like much of the book, the recipe arrives credited to a named contributor in a named city, a reminder that Buckeye Cookery was assembled from a network of Midwestern housekeepers rather than written by a single hand.