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Liquid Pudding Sauce
1 egg 1 t cornstarch 1 C sugar Butter, size of 1½ egg ½ C boiling water Beat egg and sugar to a froth. Make a thin batter with boiling water and cornstarch and butter. Pour this over egg and sugar just before serving. Beat while mixing. Flavor to taste. 1/2 C sugar 1 T flour Mrs. Jessie Higgins.
A frothy hot pudding sauce of the type served over steamed and cottage puddings. It comes together in about five minutes, so have the pudding already on the table.
- The hingeThe cornstarch base must actually boil and thicken before it meets the egg. If the water has cooled, the sauce will be thin, taste of raw starch, and leave the egg underheated.
- MeasurementsC is cup, T tablespoon, t teaspoon. So: 1 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon cornstarch, 1 1/2 cups boiling water.
- The butterThe original reads 'Butter, size of 12 egg', almost certainly a garbling of 'size of 1/2 egg'. Butter the size of a whole egg was usually reckoned at about 2 tablespoons, so half that is roughly 1 tablespoon.
- Egg safetyOne egg beaten with sugar and slashed with 1 1/2 cups of thickened liquid may not reach 160F throughout. Use a pasteurized egg, or set the finished sauce over low heat and stir until it registers 160F on a thermometer before serving.
- BeatingBeat the egg and sugar until pale and genuinely foamy, several minutes with a mixer. That foam is the whole texture of the sauce; a quick stir gives you sweetened starch water.
- Flavoring'Flavor to taste' left the choice open; vanilla, nutmeg and lemon are the usual candidates in sauces of this kind, and a teaspoon of vanilla or the grated zest of half a lemon suits a cup of sugar. Some cooks added a tablespoon of brandy or sherry.
- YieldAbout 2 cups. The recipe itself says to pour and beat just before serving; a beaten sauce like this will deflate as it stands, so make it at the last minute.
Liquid or "foamy" pudding sauces were the standard finish for the steamed and baked puddings that dominated American dessert tables into the early twentieth century, when a plain suet or bread pudding needed something sweet and hot poured over it. Cooks kept a spectrum of them: hard sauce creamed cold with butter and sugar, foamy sauce beaten over hot water, and thin cornstarch-thickened versions like this one, which stretched a single egg and a little butter across a whole family's dessert. In church and society cookbooks, recipes like this one carried the name of the member who contributed it.