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German Sauce
To the whites of 2 eggs add the juice of 1 lemon and sugar enough to beat up to a proper consistency for serving.
This is an uncooked egg-white foam, served as it is. The eggs never reach a temperature that would make them safe, which is the whole problem with the recipe as written.
- Raw egg white, never heatedNothing in this method cooks the eggs: the whites are beaten with lemon juice and sugar and taken straight to the table. Salmonella can be present in the white as well as the yolk, and neither acid from a lemon nor sugar will inactivate it. Cooked or otherwise stabilised meringue sauces are the modern equivalent, and a current recipe should be used for those.
- Sitting time makes it worseIf the sauce is mixed ahead and left standing at room temperature, that is the interval in which any bacteria in a raw egg mixture multiply. The recipe itself says only that it is beaten to consistency 'for serving'.
- Who it is riskiest forUncooked egg preparations are specifically advised against for young children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised.
- "Sugar enough" is not a measurementThe recipe gives no quantity at all, leaving the cook to judge by the feel of the beaten whites. Two whites and one lemon might take something in the region of a cup of sifted icing sugar, but the original leaves it genuinely open.
- Not the German sauce you may expectSome period books use "German sauce" for a warm custard beaten over hot water, closer to a zabaglione. This version has no cooking stage of any kind, so do not assume the two are interchangeable.
Pudding sauces occupy their own chapter in many English-language cookbooks of the period, because the boiled and steamed puddings they accompanied were dense, plain and in real need of something bright. This one belongs to a family of uncooked "foam" or "snow" sauces, whose appeal was that they cost two eggs and a lemon and could be whipped up while the pudding finished. The name is loose: nineteenth-century cookery writers attached "German" to a range of egg-and-wine or egg-and-lemon dessert sauces, generally traced to the German Weinschaumsauce and its relative the Italian zabaglione, though those are beaten over heat. The Five Roses book, published by a Canadian flour milling company and distributed to households buying its flour, collected exactly this kind of thrifty formula from its customers, and the instruction here is a single sentence with no quantities and no clear ancestry.