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German Sauce
Mix the yolks of four eggs with one-eighth of a pound of sugar, add the grated rind of half a lemon. Stir over the fire until the mixture coats the spoon.
Serve hot. The pudding may be made some days before the dinner and reheated. Annabel Lee.
A stirred egg-yolk sauce for hot puddings, given in the barest possible shorthand. Two things need spelling out before you start: the sugar weight and the fact that no liquid is listed.
- The sugarOne-eighth of a pound is 2 oz, or a generous 1/4 cup of granulated sugar. That is a modest amount for four yolks, which suits a sauce poured over an already-sweet pudding.
- The missing liquidAs printed, four yolks and 2 oz sugar over direct heat will scramble almost at once. Comparable sauces of this type are generally made with some liquid -- white wine, sherry, milk or water -- whisked in before heating, and it may be that such a line has dropped out here. Without some liquid the instruction is hard to follow as written.
- "Over the fire" means a water bath"Over the fire" -- Treat this as gentle heat: set the bowl over barely simmering water rather than directly on the burner. The sauce thickens at roughly 160F to 180F; much above 185F the yolks curdle and no amount of beating brings them back.
- Coating the spoonThe nappe test: the sauce should cling in an even film on the back of a spoon and hold a clean line when you draw a finger through it. That is the whole cooking time, usually six to ten minutes of constant stirring.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest from half a lemon. The white pith turns the sauce bitter, and modern lemons are often waxed, so scrub or use unwaxed fruit.
- The stray last sentence"The pudding may be made some days before" refers to the pudding this sauce accompanies, not the sauce. The sauce itself does not hold; make it while the pudding reheats.
- If it does breakPull it off the heat at once, tip it into a cold bowl and whisk hard. A sauce caught early will usually come back; one that has gone grainy throughout will not.
"German sauce" is a name for what German cooks call Weinschaumsauce — wine foam sauce — the same family as Italian zabaglione and French sabayon, all of them yolks, sugar and wine beaten warm until they thicken and froth. It earns its place because it turns a plain boiled or baked pudding into something that looks like restaurant work with four eggs and a few minutes' beating. The recipe carries only the name Annabel Lee, and it is compressed in the way cooks writing for other cooks tend to be: it assumes a reader who already knows that such a sauce needs wine and a water bath.