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Lemon Pudding Sauce
One and one-half cups of sugar, one well-beaten egg, juice and rind of one lemon, and one-fourth pound of butter. When thoroughly mixed, and pudding about to be served, add one pint boiling water but do not cook. If not sufficiently tart add juice of second lemon.
This is a raw-egg sauce, and the instruction "do not cook" is not incidental — it is the whole method. That is where it fails for a modern kitchen.
- The egg is never cookedA whole beaten egg is stirred into sugar, butter and lemon, then slackened with a pint (2 cups) of boiling water and served at once. The recipe forbids cooking, so the egg is never deliberately brought to and held at a pasteurising temperature; nothing in the method controls whether the mixture reaches 160F, or for how long.
- Why the temperature drop is larger than it looksWhy the final temperature is uncontrolled -- Sugar and butter take up heat before the mixture warms, and the explicit ban on cooking means the pan never goes back on the stove to make up any shortfall. How hot the finished sauce ends up depends on the vessel, the starting temperature of the ingredients and how quickly it is served.
- Served to the people least able to tolerate itServed to people who may be least able to tolerate it -- A pudding sauce like this would go over a hot pudding at a family meal, so children, the elderly and the unwell could well have been among those eating it, though the recipe says nothing about who it was for. Those are the groups for whom raw shell egg carries the greatest risk.
- If you want lemon pudding sauceUse a current recipe — a cooked lemon curd or a cornstarch-thickened lemon sauce reaches temperature by design and gives the same tart, buttery result over a steamed or baked pudding.
- Reading the original measuresFor context rather than for cooking: a pint here is 2 cups, a quarter pound of butter is one 8-tablespoon stick, and "rind" means the zest, pared or grated without the white pith.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks carry many lemon pudding sauces, and they were generally assembled at the last moment as the pudding came out of its mould. Here the egg appears to be there for body and gloss rather than for setting, and adding the boiling water off the heat keeps the sauce pourable without scrambling the egg — an approach that made sense at a time when shell eggs were not yet linked to Salmonella, a connection not widely drawn until the later twentieth century. Lemons were an ordinary grocery item by this date, shipped in quantity from Sicily and, later, California.