Cold Sauce
Whites of five eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Sweeten to the taste. Pour in some hot melted butter, stirring well. Season with lemon.-Mrs. M.G.H. Cold Sauce.
Half a pound of butter and half a pound of sugar (powdered), beaten to a froth. The juice and grated rind of a lemon, or essence of any kind, as a flavor.-Mrs. M.F.G.
Cold Sauce (for about eight people).
One heaping tablespoonful of butter, creamed till very lights, adding sugar till as thick as you can stir. Then add two table-spoonfuls of very rich milk, a glass of good wine, and a little grated nutmeg.-Mrs. P. McG.
Three separate contributors' versions of the same thing: a cold, sweetened butter sauce spooned onto hot puddings. The second and third are what later cooks call hard sauce; the first is a different animal and is the reason for the warning above.
- Why the first version failsFive egg whites are beaten raw, slackened with hot melted butter and never cooked. The recipe gives no cooking step, and there is nothing to bring the mixture to the 160F needed to deal with Salmonella; the sauce is then held and served cold. Use a current recipe if you want a foam sauce.
- The other two are uncooked but not raw-eggMrs. M.F.G.'s and Mrs. P. McG.'s versions are butter, sugar, flavouring and a little dairy or wine. They carry no egg risk; the milk in the third is a small quantity in a heavily sugared, acidic-to-alcoholic mixture, though it is still best made and eaten the same day.
- "Powdered" sugarIn 1878 this means granulated sugar ground fine, not the modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch. Either works; confectioners' gives a slightly pastier, less gritty sauce.
- "A glass of good wine"A wine glass of the period is roughly 2 fl oz, not a modern 6 oz pour. Sherry, Madeira or brandy is the usual choice for a pudding sauce.
- "Very rich milk"Nineteenth-century milk was unhomogenised and skimmed by hand, so "rich" milk was considerably richer than modern whole milk; cream is the closest modern substitute.
- "Essence of any kind"Essence is extract: vanilla, lemon, almond, rose. A teaspoon is plenty against half a pound of sugar.
- The hingeEverything depends on creaming the butter thoroughly and on keeping the sauce cold. Butter at about 65F takes air; warmer than that and the sauce separates into a greasy slick when it sits.
- YieldThe third version states eight servings. The half-pound-of-each version makes roughly two cups.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from named and initialled Virginia housewives, which is why the same dish appears three times over with three sets of proportions and no attempt to reconcile them. Cold sauce is one of several names for the preparation American cooks called hard sauce and English cooks, when it was brandied, called brandy butter: a firm sweetened butter set against the heat of a boiled or steamed pudding, so that it melts on the plate. The contrast is the whole point, and it is generally traced to the British plum-pudding tradition that Virginia households kept up well into the nineteenth century. The first version here, built on beaten whites rather than creamed butter, belongs to the older family of foam or "froth" sauces.