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Pudding Sauce (T vanilla pt cream Beat egg)
2 eggs. 1 C powdered sugar. 1 t vanilla 1/2 pt. cream Beat egg yolks, add powdered sugar, vanilla, cream and lastly the well beaten egg whites.
Mrs. Chas. Greenwood.
This is a raw-egg foam sauce of the kind poured cold over steamed and boiled puddings, and it is served without ever being heated. That, plus the missing quantities, is why it cannot be reproduced as printed.
- Raw eggs, never cookedThe yolks and whites go into the sauce uncooked and stay that way. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the yolk and on the shell, and nothing in this method brings the mixture anywhere near the 160F at which egg proteins pasteurise. A current recipe for a cooked custard or pasteurised-egg foam sauce should be used instead.
- It also sits at room temperatureIt is also likely to be held unrefrigerated -- a sweetened dairy-and-egg foam left out while the pudding is turned out sits in the range where bacteria multiply fastest, though the recipe itself says nothing about how it is held or served. The risk is not theoretical for anyone very young, elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised.
- The quantities are incompleteThe text names vanilla and cream but never states how many eggs or how much powdered sugar. As printed the recipe cannot be scaled or even attempted; the number of eggs is genuinely unrecoverable, not merely archaic.
- Half a pint of creamAn American half-pint is one cup, 8 fluid ounces. Cream of this period was skimmed from the top of unhomogenised milk and varied considerably in richness, often falling somewhere between today's light and heavy cream.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term covered finely ground sugar without cornstarch, closer to today's superfine or caster sugar than to modern confectioners' sugar. The starch in the modern product changes the texture of an uncooked foam.
- "Lastly the well beaten egg whites"The whites are beaten separately and go in at the end, which is what lifts the sauce. It is a cold relative of the beaten-egg dessert sauces, but without the gentle heating that a sabayon gets.
Community cookbooks like this one leaned heavily on steamed, boiled and baked puddings, and every household kept a handful of sauces to pour over them: hard sauce creamed with butter and sugar, thin cornstarch sauces, and foam sauces like this one, built on beaten eggs and cream. The style is essentially an uncooked cousin of sabayon or zabaglione, and it depended on a supply of eggs and cream fresh enough to be used raw, an assumption that no longer holds for eggs bought and stored through a modern supply chain. The signature is the point of the entry as much as the method: contributors' names were the currency of a community cookbook, and Mrs. Chas. Greenwood is identified, as married women then were, by her husband's name.