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Creamy Sauce
1/4 cup butter 2 cups powdered sugar 1 egg 1/2 cup thick cream 1 teaspoon vanilla Cream the butter, add the sugar; cream together; add the cream, the egg well beaten, and flavoring. If it should separate set it over hot water and stir until smooth. Serve cold.
This is a soft version of hard sauce, beaten together cold and spooned onto hot steamed puddings. The problem is structural: the egg is never cooked at any point, and the sauce is explicitly served cold.
- The raw egg is the issueA whole egg is beaten into the sauce and the mixture goes to the table cold. Nothing in the method brings it near a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the sugar-and-fat base offers no protection. The instruction to set it over hot water applies only if the emulsion separates, is a brief rescue rather than a cook, and reaches no controlled temperature.
- Who is most at riskDessert sauces of this type are handed round to whoever is at the table, which in practice means children, older relatives, pregnant guests and anyone immune-compromised — precisely the groups for whom raw egg carries the greatest consequence. If you want a creamy pudding sauce, use a current recipe, one built on pasteurised egg or a properly cooked custard base.
- Holding time makes it worseThe recipe gives no guidance on when the sauce should be made, and any period of standing at room temperature after mixing compounds the risk rather than settling the sauce.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period the term covers finely ground sugar, sometimes coarser than what is now sold as confectioners' or icing sugar; modern icing sugar is the usual substitute. Two cups is a very sweet sauce by modern taste.
- Thick creamBefore standardised dairy grading, thick cream meant the heavy layer skimmed from the top of the pan, richer than most cartons sold today. Modern heavy or double cream is the nearest equivalent.
- YieldThe quantities make roughly two to three cups of sauce, enough for eight to ten servings of a steamed or baked pudding.
Creamy sauce belongs to the family of butter-and-sugar pudding sauces that dominated Anglo-American dessert tables in the nineteenth century: hard sauce, brandy butter, foamy sauce, and this softer beaten version. All of them exist for the same reason he dense, steamed puddings they accompanied needed a rich, cold, melting contrast poured over them at the moment of serving. Gold Medal Flour cook books were promotional publications issued by the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis, the milling firm that later became General Mills, and their pudding chapters include such sauces only briefly, as supporting players. The reliance on uncooked egg for body and gloss was ordinary practice at a time when eggs frequently came from a household's own hens or a known local supplier, and when the connection between eggs and Salmonella in the shell had not yet been established.