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Cream Sauce with Vanilla & Cream
Beat the yolk of an egg, add half a cupful of powdered sugar and a teaspoonful of vanilla.
Just before serving stir in a cupful of whipped cream.
This is a raw-egg sauce that never sees heat at any stage, which is the whole reason it sits in a chapter of uncooked sauces — and the reason it cannot be recommended today.
- The raw yolk is the problemThe yolk is beaten with sugar and folded into cream, and nothing in the method brings it above room temperature. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella inside the intact egg, and neither sugar nor vanilla does anything to it.
- No acid, no alcohol, no timeNo acid, no alcohol -- Some old uncooked sauces lean on brandy or lemon juice, which at least slow bacterial growth. This one has neither, and the yolk goes into dairy that is stirred in just before the sauce reaches the table.
- Who it reachesA sweet sauce like this would be spooned over pudding or fruit and passed to whoever was at the table, which may well include children and older guests -- the people for whom a raw-egg dish carries the most risk.
- If you want the sauceUse a current recipe for a cooked custard sauce or a pasteurised-egg mousseline, where the yolk is brought to temperature before the cream goes in.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period "powdered sugar" generally meant sugar milled finer than granulated; it is not necessarily identical to what is now sold as confectioners' or icing sugar, which is finer still and usually cut with starch. Either way the fine grain would dissolve in a cold mixture more readily than granulated.
- YieldA cupful of cream whips to roughly two cups, so the finished sauce would have served six to eight as a spooned topping.
Uncooked sweet sauces filled a real need in a kitchen without much refrigeration and with a stove that heated the whole house: a cold sauce could be beaten up in five minutes and needed no watching, no double boiler and no cooling time. They are often said to belong to the same family as the hard sauces and "foamy" sauces served with steamed and boiled puddings, where the sauce supplied the richness the pudding lacked. The raw yolk here is doing two jobs. Its presence was unremarkable in domestic cookery well into the twentieth century, when raw egg appeared routinely in eggnog, mayonnaise, milk shakes and convalescent drinks. Awareness that intact eggs themselves could carry Salmonella, rather than just dirty shells, is generally traced to the later decades of the twentieth century, long after books like this one were written, which is why so many otherwise straightforward period recipes now read as off-limits.