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Sauce for Black Pudding
For each person allow 1 egg beaten separately. For every 2 eggs allow½ cup of pulverized sugar. Eggs should be beaten separately, whites and yolks. Add 2 tablespoons melted butter creamed.
Beat all together.
A foamy egg sauce of the kind poured over a hot steamed pudding — essentially uncooked meringue folded with creamed butter and sugar. The eggs are never heated, which is the problem with it now.
- Why it fails todayThe whole sauce is raw egg, beaten and served as-is; nothing in the method brings it near a safe temperature, and the hot pudding underneath does not heat it through. Salmonella risk in raw shell eggs is the reason cooked or pasteurized-egg custard sauces replaced this style. Use a current recipe for a foamy or hard sauce instead.
- Scaling, not measuringThe recipe is written per person rather than per batch: one egg each, half a cup of sugar per two eggs. The two tablespoons of butter are given without any stated scope, so it is unclear whether they are meant per batch or per some number of eggs. For six people that is six eggs and a cup and a half of sugar, which is very sweet by modern taste.
- Pulverized sugarNot granulated. Pulverized sugar of the period was ground finer than granulated but was generally coarser and less uniform than modern confectioners' sugar; grades were not standardised. It was fine enough to dissolve into beaten whites without gritting. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which changes the texture.
- "Melted butter creamed"An odd instruction. The likely sense is that the butter is melted and then beaten back with the sugar or yolks so that it emulsifies rather than pooling, though the recipe does not say so. Fully liquid butter beaten into whipped whites tends to collapse them.
- Beaten separatelyThe recipe specifies whites and yolks beaten apart, but not to what stage, nor which of them takes the sugar. The closing "beat all together" is the only combining instruction given; whether it meant a gentle folding or a genuine re-beating is not stated.
- Yield and serviceSauces like this were spooned over the pudding at the table and eaten at once, since they deflate and weep within minutes.
In a book from a Canadian flour miller, "black pudding" means a dark steamed pudding rather than the blood sausage the name signals in Britain. Boiled and steamed puddings were the standard winter dessert of the period because they needed only a pot of water and a cloth or mould, not oven space, and they were nearly always sent to the table with a sauce: hard sauce, a thin sweet pour, or a foamy egg sauce like this one. Foamy sauces of beaten egg, sugar and butter appear under many names in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North American cookbooks, and their popularity is often attributed to cheap eggs and the willingness to eat them raw, an assumption household cooking has since abandoned. The Five Roses Cook Book itself was promotional literature for Lake of the Woods Milling Company, assembled largely from recipes contributed by housewives across Canada, which accounts for the terse, per-person shorthand of an entry like this — it was written by someone who already knew how the sauce should look.