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A Nice Sauce for Puddings
Half a pound of butter; eight tablespoonfuls brown sugar; one nutmeg (grated), the white of one egg.
The butter must be creamed and the sugar beaten into it, then the egg. The wine poured gently in and stirred till the sauce is cold, then grate the nutmeg. Make it in a common sauce tureen, on the hearth, stirring all the while. Do not let it boil.--Mrs. M.E.J.B.
A wine-and-butter dessert sauce of the hard sauce family, but with two problems: the egg white is never cooked, and the wine — the ingredient the method depends on — is missing from the list entirely.
- The raw egg whiteThe white of an egg is beaten into the creamed butter and never brought anywhere near a safe temperature; the instruction is explicitly do not let it boil. Uncooked egg white carries a Salmonella risk that wine at this dilution does not reliably control, and the sauce is warmed on the hearth to a temperature that suits bacterial growth rather than killing it. Use a current recipe if you want a wine sauce for pudding.
- No wine quantity is givenThe wine appears only in the method, never in the ingredient list. Omissions of this kind are common in nineteenth-century receipts, and here the amount is genuinely unrecoverable — anything from a few spoonfuls to a full gill (half a cup) would fit the wording, and the two give quite different sauces.
- The nutmeg is listed twiceGrated nutmeg appears in the ingredients and then again as a final step. This looks like a slip in setting the receipt rather than a double dose; one whole nutmeg grated into half a pound of butter is already an assertive amount by modern palates.
- "A common sauce tureen, on the hearth"The tureen sits at the edge of the fire as a gentle warming vessel — the aim is to keep the butter soft enough to stir while the wine is worked in without the mixture ever getting hot. There is no cooking step in this recipe at all, which is precisely the difficulty.
- Half a pound of butterTwo American sticks, 225 g. With eight tablespoons of brown sugar this makes a rich, quite loose sauce rather than the stiff moulded hard sauce served in slices.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of these initialled receipts — Mrs. M.E.J.B. and her kind gave what they knew by hand, which may be why the wine quantity never made it onto the page. Butter-and-sugar sauces enriched with wine or brandy descend from the English hard sauce served with plum pudding at Christmas, and in the American South they were poured over boiled and steamed puddings of all sorts. Beaten egg white was sometimes added to lighten such sauces and give them a foamy body; cooked custard and sabayon sauces achieve a similar effect without raw egg.