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Hard Sauce
Half a cup of butter, one cup of confectioners' sugar, and the white of one egg. Cream the butter, add the sugar little by little, then the stiffly beaten white of an egg. Flavor with nutmeg, cinnamon, or vanilla.
A classic hard sauce, but this version binds the butter and sugar with raw egg white and is served without any cooking at all.
- The egg white is never heatedNothing in this sauce reaches a temperature that would destroy Salmonella, and the finished sauce sits at room or refrigerator temperature until it is spooned onto pudding. Raw egg white carries the same risk as raw yolk; whipping it changes nothing.
- Who is most at riskHard sauce is a holiday sauce, which means it tends to be served to a mixed table including small children, pregnant women and the elderly. Those are precisely the groups for whom raw-egg dishes are advised against.
- The egg is optional to the dishThe egg white is here to lighten the texture. Plain creamed butter and sugar with flavouring is a common form of hard sauce, so the risky ingredient is not structural. Use a current recipe.
- Confectioners' sugar has changedConfectioners' sugar -- Older recipes calling for confectioners' or powdered sugar did not necessarily mean the uniformly fine 10X sold today; grades varied. This affects texture rather than safety.
- FlavouringsNutmeg, cinnamon and vanilla are given as alternatives, not a blend. Brandy, rum or sherry were also common flavourings for pudding sauces; this recipe offers none.
- YieldHalf a cup of butter with a cup of sugar and a beaten white makes roughly a cup and a half of sauce, enough for six to eight servings of pudding.
Hard sauce takes its name from its consistency rather than its strength: unlike pourable custards and other liquid dessert sauces, it is chilled until firm and cut or scooped onto a hot pudding, where it melts on contact. The English form, generally traced to the nineteenth-century Christmas pudding table, is brandy butter; American cookbooks of the late 1800s and early 1900s used the same creamed butter-and-sugar base and often offered spice or vanilla in place of spirits, as this book does. The addition of a beaten egg white fits a broader turn-of-the-century taste for aerated sweets, from cake frostings to "snow" puddings, in the period when the hand-cranked eggbeater made stiff whites easy to produce.