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Cream Sauce II
1 egg 1 cup powdered sugar 1/2 cup thick cream 1/4 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Beat white of egg until stiff; add yolk of egg well beaten, and sugar gradually; dilute cream with milk, beat until stiff, combine mixtures, and flavor.
Yellow Sauce I 2 eggs 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla or 1/2 teaspoon vanilla and 1 teaspoon brandy Beat eggs until very light, add sugar gradually and continue beating; then flavor.
This is an uncooked foam sauce for hot puddings: raw egg beaten with sugar and cream, never heated at any stage. The notes below explain the period vocabulary and why the method itself is the problem.
- The egg is never cookedNothing in the method brings the egg above room temperature, and the sauce is finished and served as a cold foam. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and, less often, within the yolk, and a sugar-and-cream mixture held at room temperature does nothing to control it. Anyone cooking for children, older people, pregnant women or anyone immune-compromised should use a current recipe for a cooked or pasteurised-egg dessert sauce instead.
- It also sits outThe recipe gives no holding instructions, and a cream-and-egg emulsion left at warm room temperature is a growth medium; the sugar is not present in anything like preserving quantity.
- "Powdered sugar"In American books of this period powdered sugar usually means a fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name now. The two behave differently when beaten into egg.
- "Thick cream"Heavy or double cream, roughly 36-40 percent butterfat. The recipe does not say why it is diluted with milk; very rich cream whips less predictably, and modern heavy cream whips readily without the milk.
- YieldNeither sauce gives a quantity. One egg with a cup of sugar and three-quarters of a cup of dairy beats up to a considerably larger volume of foam, but the book gives no serving count.
- On the second sauceThe yellow sauce that follows is the same idea with the cream left out entirely: whole raw eggs beaten to a foam with sugar and flavoured, sometimes with brandy. The brandy is a flavouring only and offers no meaningful protection.
Foamy uncooked sauces of beaten egg, sugar and cream were a common dressing for steamed, boiled and baked puddings in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery, where they went by names such as cream sauce, foamy sauce or yellow sauce. They existed because a stiff pudding wanted moisture and richness, and because a household with eggs and cream on hand could produce a sauce quickly with a bowl and a whisk, needing neither a double boiler nor a watchful eye on a custard. The habit of numbering variants -- Cream Sauce I, II, and so on -- is characteristic of the cooking-school style of the era, in which a basic formula and its permutations were catalogued together rather than printed as separate dishes. The comfort with raw egg in these sauces is a period marker in itself; the risks now attached to shell eggs were not understood at the time.