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Yellow Sauce
Beat yolks of two eggs until light and creamy, add half cup powdered sugar gradually, and continue beating. Beat whites of two eggs until stiff and dry, add another half-cup of sugar and continue beating. Combine mixtures and add one teaspoon vanilla or the same of other flavoring.
— Miss F. Victoria Myers
This is a hard sauce of the uncooked-egg type: nothing in it is ever heated, and the eggs go to the table exactly as they came out of the shell. That is the problem.
- The eggs are never cookedThere is no custard stage, no double boiler, no hot syrup poured over the whites. Raw yolks and whites, two eggs' worth split between the two mixtures, are beaten with sugar and served. Nothing in the method brings any part of the sauce near the 160F at which Salmonella in egg is reliably killed.
- Sugar and beating are not treatmentsPowdered sugar and vigorous aeration change the texture, not the microbiology. A raw meringue holds pathogens as well as a raw yolk does, and the whipped volume means the sauce sits at room temperature while dessert is served, which favours growth rather than checking it.
- Who this reachesAn uncooked egg sauce of this kind may be served to children, to the elderly and to convalescents, and those are the groups for whom egg-borne illness is most likely to be serious.
- If you want this kind of sauceA current recipe for a cooked egg sauce, a sabayon brought to temperature over water, or one built on pasteurized eggs will give the same effect. Use one of those rather than this text.
- Reading the original"Powdered sugar" in books of this period usually means a finely pounded sugar, often close to what is now sold as confectioners' or icing sugar, though usage varies. "Stiff and dry" for the whites is older phrasing for a full, firm peak, at or near the point where the meringue starts to break and weep.
Yellow sauce belongs to a family of sweet pudding sauces of the sort found in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collections, alongside hard sauce, foamy sauce and the flour-thickened "liquid sauces." The name appears to be simply descriptive: it is yellow because the yolks are beaten in, in contrast to the white foamy sauces made from whites and sugar alone. Sauces of this sort were common accompaniments to steamed and boiled puddings, where a rich, sweet, aerated topping supplied flavour that a plain flour-and-suet pudding lacked. The attribution to a named contributor is typical of community cookbooks of the period, which collected sauces like this under the contributor's name.