Home › Sauces › Strawberry Sauce
Strawberry Sauce
Half tea-cup of butter, one and a half tea-cups of sugar, and one pint of strawberries mashed till juicy. (Canned berries may be substituted for fresh ones). Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; then stir in the berries and the beaten white of an egg.
This is a creamed hard sauce in the English pudding-sauce tradition, thinned and coloured with fruit. The problem is the last ingredient: nothing in it is ever heated.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe beaten white is folded into a cold butter-and-sugar cream and served as-is. Raw shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean egg, and neither sugar nor the small amount of fruit acid here inactivates it. A sauce spooned over pudding is not subsequently cooked, so there is no step that makes it safe.
- Who is most at riskAn uncooked-egg sauce is of most concern for children, older people, pregnant women and anyone immune-compromised, and any risk increases the longer it is held unrefrigerated. If you want a strawberry sauce for a pudding, use a current recipe.
- Tea-cupA nineteenth-century tea-cup is conventionally reckoned smaller than a modern measuring cup, often taken as roughly six fluid ounces, which would make half a tea-cup of butter about three-quarters of a stick. The equivalence is approximate and should be treated as such.
- Canned berriesBerries put up at the period were often packed in syrup, so canned fruit may be softer and sweeter than fresh; if so, the recipe's sugar quantity may need reducing.
- What the sauce is doingThe butter and sugar are creamed to hold air and body; the fruit and the whipped white lighten and extend it. The construction is that of a brandy or lemon hard sauce, which suggests a soft, cold sauce rather than a poured one.
Buckeye Cookery carries a run of pudding sauces built on a creamed butter-and-sugar base flavoured with wine, lemon, nutmeg, vanilla or fruit. Strawberries were among the earliest fruits of the Midwestern year and were commonly put up at home, which is presumably why the recipe offers canned berries as a substitute. Beaten egg white was used to lighten hard sauces in nineteenth-century American cookbooks and the practice persisted in print into the twentieth century, before the food-safety understanding that now rules it out.