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SAUCE (Tablespoon corn starch cup)
1 tablespoon corn starch 1 cup boiling water 1/8 teaspoon salt 3/4 cup sugar 1 egg Flavoring Mix corn starch with a little cold water and cook until clear in the boiling water. Add salt. Beat sugar and egg together until very light, pour the hot starch on slowly, and flavoring and serve.
This is a foaming egg sauce for steamed and boiled puddings, and the problem is structural: the egg is never cooked. The points below explain why the method cannot reach a safe temperature.
- The egg is the whole issueOne raw egg is beaten with sugar and then hot starch is poured over it. Nothing is returned to the heat, and the sauce is served immediately, so the egg's only heat treatment is whatever the incoming liquid provides.
- The arithmetic does not workAbout 1 cup of boiling water thickened with cornstarch, poured into roughly 3/4 cup sugar and one egg at room temperature, lands at some unpredictable intermediate temperature and begins dropping at once. Salmonella reduction depends on holding a temperature, not touching it, and this mixture is never held.
- Sugar works against youThe 3/4 cup of sugar raises the temperature at which egg proteins set, which is exactly why the sauce stays smooth and frothy rather than scrambling. The same effect means visible thickening is no evidence that the egg has been pasteurised.
- "Pour the hot starch on slowly"Slow pouring reads as deliberate tempering, meant to protect the texture. It also means the first spoonfuls of hot liquid lose much of their heat to the bowl and to the room-temperature sugar-egg mass before the rest arrives.
- Period assumptionThe recipe gives no thought to interior temperatures, and its safety margin, such as it was, rested on whatever egg supply the household had. That is not a basis for judging a carton egg of unknown age and origin.
- If you want the sauceUse a current recipe for a cooked egg sauce or stirred custard, one that specifies a temperature and a holding time, or one built on pasteurised egg.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pudding chapters commonly carried a page or two of "sauces" at the end, because a boiled or steamed pudding on its own is dry and plain; the sauce was where the sugar, the flavouring and the small luxury lived. The type here belongs to a family sometimes called foamy or frothy sauce, in which beaten egg and sugar are lightened and then loosened with a hot liquid, the cheaper cousin of a hard sauce made with butter and of a proper stirred custard. Cornstarch, which reached American kitchens in commercial quantity from the 1840s onward, is doing the work that arrowroot or a flour roux once did, in a cheap, quick, egg-stretching sauce. The unspecified "Flavoring" is a period shorthand: vanilla, lemon, nutmeg or a spoonful of sherry would all fit, depending on the pudding.