Home › Puddings › Pudding Sauce
Pudding Sauce
1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 2 tablespoons wine 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1/4 cup boiling water Cream butter, add the sugar, beat for fifteen minutes, add the eggs, beat to a froth. Just before sending to the table stir in the hot water, beat to a foam, add vanilla and wine.
This is a foamy or "frothed" pudding sauce of the creamed-butter school, and the problem with it is structural rather than incidental: the eggs go in raw and never reach a temperature that would make them safe.
- The eggs are never cookedTwo whole eggs are beaten into creamed butter and sugar, and the only heat in the recipe is a quarter cup of boiling water stirred into a cold, bulky mass just before serving. That water is nowhere near enough to bring the mixture to the 160F at which egg proteins are considered safe; the sauce goes to the table essentially raw.
- Salmonella, not spoilageThe risk here is Salmonella in the shell egg itself, which no amount of beating, sugar or wine addresses. Two tablespoons of wine in roughly two cups of finished sauce is a negligible amount of alcohol and has no antimicrobial effect.
- Held at room temperatureThe instruction to beat the butter and sugar for fifteen minutes and add the eggs, then finish "just before sending to the table," means the egg sits at kitchen warmth throughout. Warm sugared egg is a growth medium, and the sauce would then have stood on the table beside a hot pudding.
- If you want a foamy pudding sauceUse a current recipe. The safe versions of this sauce are built over a double boiler, or on pasteurized eggs, and they specify a temperature; this one does neither.
- On the fifteen minutes of beatingThe figure is not necessarily an exaggeration. Creaming half a cup of butter into a cup of sugar by hand, with a wooden spoon or a wire whisk, would take considerably longer to reach a pale, aerated state than the same job in a modern stand mixer.
- "Wine" hereIn American cookbooks of this period, unspecified wine in a dessert sauce often meant sherry or Madeira, sometimes a sweet white. It is a flavouring, not a structural ingredient.
Sauces of this kind sit between two older forms: hard sauce, which is simply butter and sugar creamed and served cold in a lump beside a hot pudding, and the whipped or "foamy" sauce, which lightens the same base with egg and a little hot liquid so that it slumps into a froth over the pudding. American cookbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carry both. Here the froth is raised by the boiling water beaten in at the last moment, with the pudding's own heat doing no more than keeping it loose at the table. Gold Medal was a flour-miller's brand, and the book is promotional; the sauces are supporting material to the puddings, given in a compressed shorthand that assumed a cook already knew what creaming and frothing looked like. The free hand with butter, sugar and eggs, and the splash of wine, suggest a company or Sunday sauce rather than everyday fare.