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Yellow Sauce II
2 eggs 1 cup powdered sugar 3 tablespoons wine Beat yolks of eggs until thick, add one-half the sugar gradually; beat whites of eggs until stiff, add gradually remaining sugar; combine mixtures, and add wine.
This is a foamy uncooked egg sauce of a type common in pudding chapters a century ago. Nothing in it is ever heated, which is the reason it cannot be recommended today.
- Raw egg, no cooking stepBoth yolks and whites go into the finished sauce raw and are served as-is over pudding. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and occasionally within the egg itself, and this recipe never brings them near the 160F at which that risk is controlled.
- The wine does not make it safeThree tablespoons of wine in a whipped mixture of two eggs and a cup of sugar gives an alcohol level far too low to inactivate bacteria, and no meaningful holding time is specified. A cold sweetened egg foam left standing at room temperature is a growth medium, not a preserved one.
- Who is most at riskUncooked-egg sauces are specifically inadvisable for young children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised — often exactly the people offered a soft pudding. If you want a wine-foam pudding sauce, use a current recipe for a cooked sabayon or a pasteurized-egg version.
- "Powdered sugar" in this periodIn books of this vintage powdered sugar usually means a fine granulated or superfine sugar, not the modern cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar. The distinction matters in egg foams, where cornstarch dulls the gloss and can leave a chalky edge.
- "Wine" means a fortified wine"Wine" -- The recipe specifies only "wine." Sherry, Madeira and sweet port were commonly called for in pudding sauces of this period, and a sweet or fortified wine will sit better against a cup of sugar than a dry table wine.
- YieldTwo eggs and a cup of sugar, beaten separately and combined, make a loose foam; the recipe itself states no yield or number of servings.
Foamy egg-and-wine sauces sit in nearly every American pudding chapter from the 1870s through the 1920s, usually clustered with hard sauce, lemon sauce and "foamy sauce" as the standard dressings for steamed, cottage and bread puddings. They are close relatives of Italian zabaglione and French sabayon, but where those are whisked over hot water until they thicken, this household version is left uncooked, with the beaten whites supplying volume rather than heat. That a book will print two numbered variants of the same yellow sauce says something about the period's puddings: plain, thrifty, steamed in a mold, and dependent on the sauce for whatever richness and flavor the dessert had. Raw-egg preparations of this kind stayed in print for decades and fell out of general use as the risk from shell eggs came to be better understood in the later twentieth century.