Cream Sauce
1 cup powdered sugar 1 egg 2 cups cream 1 teaspoon vanilla Mix egg yolk and sugar; add white of egg beaten until stiff, flavoring, and just before sending to the table the beaten cream. Serve cold.
This is a hard sauce of the uncooked kind — a foamy dessert sauce built on raw egg and raw cream that is never heated at any stage and is then held at table temperature. That is the problem, and it is not fixable by adjusting the method.
- The egg is never cookedBoth yolk and beaten white go into the sauce raw and stay raw. Shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella that only heat removes; a sauce that never reaches 160F leaves that risk intact, and the sugar and cream do nothing to reduce it.
- It sits at serving temperatureIt is never heated at any stage -- the cream is folded in "just before sending to the table," and although the recipe says "serve cold" it gives no chilling time or holding instructions. An uncooked egg-and-cream foam left at table temperature is the kind of mixture associated with egg-borne illness.
- Nothing here is acidic or alcoholicSome old raw-egg sauces lean on brandy, sherry or lemon; acid lowers the pH and spirits can slow microbial growth, though neither makes a raw egg safe. This one is sugar, egg, cream and vanilla, with no inhibitory ingredient at all.
- What to make insteadIf you want a pourable custard sauce for pudding, use a current recipe for a cooked crème anglaise, which is stirred over heat to a measured temperature and then chilled.
- On the period vocabulary, for reading"Powdered sugar" in American books of this era usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-containing confectioners' sugar sold today, and "beaten cream" simply means whipped cream. Cream of the period was often unpasteurized and unhomogenized, and its fat content varied; either way, it goes into this sauce unheated.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, was a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook that ranged well beyond chocolate, and it includes sauces meant to be spooned over steamed and boiled puddings — a class of dessert prominent on American tables of the period. Uncooked sauces of this kind, sugar beaten with raw egg and enriched with cream or butter, appear in period cookbooks under names such as cream sauce and foamy sauce; they needed no double boiler, only a bowl and a whisk. They belong to a period when raw eggs in an uncooked dressing, custard or sauce were unremarkable — an assumption that the later recognition of egg-associated Salmonella retired.