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Wine Sauce No. 2
2 cups white sugar 2 eggs Butter size of egg ½ cup wine 2 tablespoons sweet cream.
Beat sugar, eggs and butter to a cream Add wine and sweet cream, and it is ready for use. Vanilla is sometimes added.
This is a hard sauce built on raw egg: nothing in the method brings the mixture above room temperature, and it is spooned onto pudding as it is. That is the whole problem with it.
- The eggs are never cookedSugar, egg, butter and wine are simply beaten together and served. Eggs eaten raw carry a risk of Salmonella that cannot be beaten out of them, and a sauce like this is often held at room temperature on the table for the length of a meal, which is exactly the condition the bacteria prefer.
- Half a cup of wine will not make it safeThe alcohol is diluted across two cups of sugar and two eggs and ends up at only a low single-digit percentage in the finished sauce. Wine at that strength does not pasteurise anything; the belief that spirits or wine "cook" eggs in eggnog and hard sauces is folklore, not microbiology.
- The cream compounds itTwo tablespoons of raw sweet cream at the time this was written might have been unpasteurised. Any cream used today should be pasteurised as a matter of course, but that does nothing for the eggs.
- Who it is worst forUncooked-egg sauces are specifically discouraged for children, older adults, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised — which describes a fair share of the people a pudding sauce gets served to.
- If you want a wine sauceUse a current recipe: modern versions are either cooked over a bain-marie to a custard temperature, built on pasteurised eggs, or made without egg at all. Do not adapt this one by eye.
- Reading the original"Butter size of egg" is conventionally read as about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons, and "sweet cream" means fresh cream as opposed to soured.
Pudding sauces occupy a small section of the Five Roses Cook Book, alongside puddings — steamed, boiled, baked from stale bread or suet — that were plain by design and looked to the sauce for richness. Wine sauces divide broadly into two kinds: the cooked, thickened over water like a sabayon, and the uncooked, essentially a hard sauce loosened with wine, of which this is one. The Five Roses book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and drew on recipes contributed by Canadian users of its flour, which may account for the terse, assume-you-know-this style here and for the casual "vanilla is sometimes added." Raw egg in a dessert sauce was unremarkable in a period before Salmonella in shell eggs was understood as a routine hazard; that shift in advice came later, in the closing decades of the twentieth century.