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Sauce for a Berry Pudding
Beat to a cream one-half cup of butter, and very gradually beat in one cup of sugar, one teaspoon corn starch, one wineglass of wine, and the white of one egg. When this is a perfect froth, stir in onethird cup of boiling water. Set this in a dish of hot water for two or three minutes, stirring all the while, and then serve.
— Mrs. Chas. E. Nichols
A foamy dessert sauce of the old hard-sauce family, lightened with beaten egg white and warmed rather than cooked. It is built cold and finished over hot water, and the order of operations is the whole recipe.
- WineglassIn American receipt books of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, or 1/4 cup. Sherry, madeira or a sweet white wine all suit a berry pudding.
- Beat to a creamThe butter must be genuinely soft, around 65F, before you start, and the sugar added a spoonful at a time. Cold butter will not take up the wine and you will get a grainy, separated sauce.
- The egg whiteStir it in unbeaten with the wine; the "perfect froth" comes from the beating, not from a separately whipped meringue. A hand mixer gets there faster than the original's arm-powered version.
- Raw eggTwo or three minutes in a dish of hot water warms this sauce but does not cook it, so the white stays essentially raw. If that matters for who is eating, use a pasteurized egg white or pasteurized-in-shell egg.
- The boiling waterAdd it in a thin thread while beating, not in one go. A third of a cup of boiling water poured into cold creamed butter will melt it in patches and break the emulsion.
- Hot water bath, not heatSet the bowl in hot water off the stove and stir constantly. If the water is too hot, the butter oils out and the froth collapses into a greasy puddle.
- CornstarchOne teaspoon is presumably meant to help hold the foam together. It will not thicken anything at these temperatures, so do not increase it hoping for body.
- Yield and servingIt is at its best within a few minutes of leaving the water bath; it deflates on standing.
Berry puddings — steamed or baked batters full of blackberries, huckleberries or raspberries — were a familiar summer dessert, and they were typically served with a sauce. The usual accompaniments ranged from plain sweetened cream to hard sauce (butter and sugar beaten stiff, no heat at all) to the frothy wine sauces like this one, which sit between the two: creamed like hard sauce, then loosened with wine, egg white and boiling water so it pours. The amount is given as a wineglass rather than a measured cup, a reminder that these collections were written by cooks for other cooks. The attribution to Mrs. Chas. E. Nichols is typical of the compiled church-and-society cookbook, where each contributor's name stood as the guarantee of the receipt.