Golden Sauce

This is a variation on hard sauce — creamed butter and sugar, served cold in a mound on hot pudding — enriched with raw egg yolk. Nothing in it is ever cooked, and that is the problem.

• The yolks are never heatedTwo raw yolks are beaten into cold creamed butter and sugar and the sauce is served as is. Even spooned onto a hot pudding, the sauce does not reach a temperature that would kill Salmonella; it simply softens and melts. Any period the sauce spends unrefrigerated before serving compounds the risk.
• Who is likely to eat itA pudding sauce set out for a family table may reach children, elderly relatives or others for whom a raw-egg sauce carries the greatest consequence. Use a current recipe for a cooked custard sauce or a yolk-free hard sauce instead.
• The yellow color-pasteConcentrated coloring pastes of this period were not standardized and, before food-dye regulation, could include compounds no longer permitted in food. Any tin or jar of it surviving from that era should not go near a plate.
• "Hard sauce as above"The base is butter creamed with powdered sugar until pale, and, as this recipe's wording shows, the parent recipe includes beaten egg whites and a flavoring. Golden Sauce drops both, so the yolks and the added flavoring carry the sauce.
• Where it was meant to goHard sauces belong on steamed and boiled puddings: plum pudding, cabinet pudding, suet or fig puddings. The contrast of a cold, firm sauce melting into a hot pudding is the entire point of the form.