Home › Pudding Sauces › Orange Sauce (Whites eggs cup powdered sugar)
Orange Sauce (Whites eggs cup powdered sugar)
Whites 3 eggs 1 cup powdered sugar Juice and rind 2 oranges Juice 1 lemon Beat whites until stiff, add sugar gradually, and continue beating; add rind and fruit juices.
This is an uncooked foam sauce: three raw egg whites are whipped with sugar and acidic fruit juice and served as-is over pudding. Nothing in the method brings the eggs to a safe temperature.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites are beaten and served without cooking, and a soft foam of this kind is likely to be held at room temperature rather than chilled. Salmonella can be present in and on shell eggs, and a warm foam is a favourable environment for it. Anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised is at particular risk.
- Citrus juice is not a treatmentThe juice of two oranges and one lemon dispersed through three whites and a cup of sugar does not lower the pH far enough, or for long enough, to inactivate pathogens. Acidity in a cold mixture is a flavouring here, not a safety step.
- No cooked-custard stageMany period pudding sauces beat the whites into a hot syrup or a cooked custard base, which gives some heat treatment. This one has no such stage at all, so there is no point in the method that could be extended or brought up to temperature.
- If you want this sauceUse a current recipe written for pasteurized egg whites or a cooked meringue base. We are not supplying a revised version of this one.
- On the ingredient list"Powdered sugar" in books of this period usually means finely ground sugar rather than the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold today, and the "rind" means the coloured zest only, grated fine — the white pith is bitter.
Frothed sauces of this kind belong to a large family of pudding sauces — hard sauce, foamy sauce, wine sauce, lemon sauce — used to dress up a plain boiled or steamed pudding, a common close to a family dinner in this period. Recipes of this type also gave cooks a use for whites left over from a yolk-heavy custard or cake. The recipe reads as it does because the risk of raw shell egg was not yet a standard part of domestic advice.