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Foamy Sauce
Cream together half a cup of butter, a cupful of powdered sugar and two tablespoonfuls of sherry flavoring. Just before serving, add the white of an egg stiffly beaten and a quarter of a cup of boiling water. Beat until it foams.
A foamy sauce of the hard-sauce family, meant for spooning over hot puddings. The problem is structural rather than a matter of technique: the egg white is never cooked, and nothing in the method brings it near a safe temperature.
- The raw egg whiteA quarter cup of boiling water beaten into roughly a cup and a half of cold creamed butter and sugar loses its heat almost instantly; the finished sauce stays well below any pasteurising temperature. Raw egg white carries a Salmonella risk, and a sauce for a pudding may well reach the guests least able to tolerate it.
- Standing time makes it worseIf you want a foamy sauce, use a current recipe built on pasteurised whites or a cooked base.
- "Sherry flavoring"Apparently not sherry itself but a bottled flavouring sold in its place. Two tablespoons is a generous quantity measured against modern bottled flavourings.
- Powdered sugarConfectioners' sugar. Modern boxed confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which may slightly dull the gloss of a creamed butter sauce.
- What "foamy" meantThe name describes the texture rather than a cooked meringue: the whipped white and the hot water are beaten in at the last moment to lift a dense hard sauce into something light enough to slump over a hot pudding. Cooked versions of the same sauce, beaten over a double boiler, appear in cookbooks of the period and do not share this recipe's problem.
- YieldPerhaps two cups once beaten, enough for several pudding servings.
Foamy sauce is the lightened cousin of English hard sauce — creamed butter and sugar with brandy or sherry, served on Christmas pudding — which American cookbooks absorbed wholesale in the nineteenth century and then made airier with beaten egg white and hot water. The tell here is "sherry flavoring": bottled imitation extracts stood in for wine and spirits in a great many American dessert recipes, and the habit was a durable one in books written for households that kept no liquor. Uncooked sweet sauces had the practical advantage of demanding no range time at the last minute.