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Egg and Orange Sauce
Beat two egg whites until stiff, add gradually half a cup of orange juice and the same quantity of confectioners' sugar, stirring all the time. Grate the orange rind over the sauce and serve with vanilla ice cream.
This is an uncooked foam built on raw egg whites, and nothing in the method brings them anywhere near a temperature that would make them safe. The points below explain the specific problem rather than offering a workaround.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites are beaten and served as-is over ice cream. Salmonella Enteritidis can be present in the white as well as the yolk of an intact shell egg, and there is no cooking step here to reduce it. Nothing in the acid from the orange juice or the sugar is sufficient to make the mixture safe.
- Who is most at riskSoft, sweet sauces of this kind would have been an easy thing to give children, invalids and the elderly — exactly the groups for whom a salmonella infection is most likely to be serious. That is worth knowing before assuming an old dessert sauce is harmless.
- It also will not holdHalf a cup of thin orange juice beaten into two whites is a lot of liquid for a meringue to carry, even with the sugar; expect the foam to weep and separate fairly quickly. Cooked and gelatine-set versions of the same idea appear in later cookbooks.
- If you want the flavourAn orange sauce for ice cream is a perfectly good idea; use a current recipe that either cooks the eggs to a safe temperature or omits them entirely.
- Reading the original units"Confectioners' sugar" is powdered sugar, commonly cut with a little starch to keep it free-flowing. Half a cup is roughly 60 g, which tells you how sweet this was meant to be against unsweetened juice.
Uncooked sweet sauces appear in many American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and one practical attraction was that they needed no fire. A cook with a bowl, a whisk and an orange could put something over plain ice cream quickly, without standing at a range. They sit alongside the older English hard sauce and wine sauce served with puddings, lightened with beaten white instead of creamed butter. Versions of the idea that survive in modern books have generally been rewritten as cooked custards or Italian-meringue variants where the sugar is added hot.