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Cocoanut Sauce
Cream together half a cupful of butter and a cupful of confectioners' sugar until very light and white, then add a cupful of grated cocoanut and the white of an egg beaten stiff.
This is a hard-sauce style dressing for puddings, beaten rather than cooked — and that is the problem with it.
- The egg white is never cookedThe whole sauce is assembled cold and served cold, so the beaten white receives no heat at any point. Raw shell egg carries a risk of Salmonella, and unlike a raw egg stirred into a batter, nothing here will later reach a killing temperature.
- No sugar or alcohol protectionSome uncooked dessert sauces of this era carry a heavy load of spirit, or are built on a syrup cooked to the thread stage; neither treatment reliably pasteurises egg, and this recipe has neither in any case: a cup of confectioners' sugar creamed into butter does not pasteurise anything.
- Served on warm puddingsSauces of this class were spooned onto hot steamed and baked puddings, so the mixture is likely to be warmed rather than kept cold. If you want a coconut sauce for a pudding, use a current recipe.
- "Cocoanut" in this periodThe older spelling refers to ordinary coconut. "Grated" suggests fresh coconut cracked and grated at home — unsweetened and moist — though packaged dried sweetened shred was already on the market by this period, and it would push an already very sweet sauce further.
- Confectioners' sugarFinely powdered sugar, in modern practice cut with a little starch. It creams into butter without grit, which matters in a sauce that is never heated to dissolve its sugar.
Uncooked sweet sauces served a specific problem: a steamed or boiled pudding came to the table hot and needed something rich and cold to melt over it, made in advance without tying up a burner. The family is headed by hard sauce — butter creamed with sugar, flavoured with brandy or rum — and the variations run through fruit, nut and coconut versions like this one. Grated coconut became a common household flavouring in America through the later nineteenth century as whole nuts arrived reliably by steamer from the Caribbean, and packaged shredded coconut followed. The beaten egg white is a lightener, added to keep the mixture from setting into a dense paste on the plate — at a time when the pathogen questions we now attach to raw egg were not understood.