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Strawberry Sauce
Cream together one cup of sugar and a half-cup of butter; add the whipped white of an egg, then one cup of mashed or chopped berries. Place on ice several hours before serving.
This is a fruit-flavoured hard sauce, meant to be spooned cold onto pudding, cottage pudding or plain cake. It is built entirely without heat, and that is where it fails a modern kitchen.
- The raw egg whiteThe beaten white is folded in raw and never cooked, and the sauce is then held for hours before serving. Salmonella can be present in the white as well as the yolk, and chilling does nothing to kill it; it only slows growth. A current recipe should be used instead.
- Hours on ice is not a safeguardAn icebox of the period ran considerably warmer than a modern refrigerator, and "several hours" of holding a raw-egg, butter-based sauce is not a safety control. The long cold holding here appears to be for texture.
- Who is most at riskChildren, invalids, the elderly and pregnant women are the group for whom raw egg carries the greatest consequence.
- "Place on ice"In a book of this period this most likely means the icebox rather than a bowl of ice water, and suggests the sauce was meant to be served cold rather than poured warm.
- Proportions, for referenceOne cup sugar to a half-cup butter is a common hard-sauce ratio, roughly 200 g sugar to 115 g butter, with the berries and the egg white loosening it.
Hard sauce een together with sugar creamed into butter and served cold against a hot pudding — was a fixture of nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery, best known in its brandy-flavoured Christmas form. The fruit versions belong to the summer end of the same tradition, all of them ways of stretching a short strawberry season across a household's table. The beaten egg white is a lightening trick of a kind found in the same period's boiled and foamy sauces: it aerates the butter-sugar base so the sauce melts more readily and looks like something more than sweetened butter. Recipes of this kind survived well into the twentieth century in home cookbooks.