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Custard Sauce
cup sugar 2 egg whites 1 teaspoon vanilla few grains salt Make a custard of milk, egg yolks, sugar and salt; when thick, add butter, flavoring and beaten whites. Serve cold. 1 cup sugar Foamy Sauce No. I 1 cup milk 3 egg whites rind and juice of 1 lemon Heat the milk. Beat egg whites until stiff; add sugar, continue beating; add milk and flavoring, continue beating. Serve when foamy. Foamy Sauce No. 2 ½ cup butter 1 egg yolk 1 cup powdered sugar 2 tablespoons wine 2 egg whites Cream butter; add sugar, yolk of egg and wine. Cook over hot water, until hot. Remove from fire and add beaten whites of eggs. 3 egg whites ½ cup powdered sugar Foamy Sauce No. 3 rind of lemon 1 cup boiling water 1 teaspoon flavoring Beat whites until stiff; add sugar and flavoring and continue beating, adding hot water very gradually. Serve hot or cold.
Fruit Sauce No. I 1 cup sugar 1 cup water cup fruit juice 2 tablespoons arrowroot Mix arrowroot, sugar and water; boil ten minutes, stirring constantly. Add fruit juice and cook until syrupy, and serve hot. 1 cup sugar cup water Fruit Sauce No. 2 1 cup pulp and juice of fruit 1 tablespoon lemon juice Boil sugar and water until syrupy. Add lemon and fruit juice and pulp. Serve hot without straining. 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup water
This page runs a custard sauce and five related dessert sauces together. Several of them are built on egg whites that never reach a safe temperature, so read the note on raw egg before deciding what to make.
- Raw egg whitesFoamy Sauce No. 1 folds heated milk into beaten raw whites and is served straight away; Foamy Sauce No. 3 relies on a gradual stream of boiling water to do the same job. Neither method brings the egg to a temperature that would control salmonella, and both are served as-is. Use a current recipe if you want a foamy sauce.
- Foamy Sauce No. 2This one is cooked over hot water, but only "until hot," with no temperature given, and the beaten whites are then added off the heat and not cooked at all. The same problem applies.
- The custard hingeA stirred custard sauce sets between about 170 and 180F and curdles above that. Cook it over hot water rather than direct heat, stir constantly, and pull it the moment it coats the back of a spoon.
- Missing quantitiesThe custard sauce entry begins mid-list: the sugar amount is cut off, and the milk, egg yolks and butter called for in the method have no amounts on the page at all.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term covers finely ground sugar, which may or may not be the modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' or icing sugar. Foamy Sauces Nos. 2 and 3 call for it; No. 1 calls for plain sugar.
- "Wine"An unqualified tablespoon or two of wine in a dessert sauce of this period was often a fortified wine, such as sherry, Madeira or Marsala, though the book does not specify.
- Arrowroot in Fruit Sauce No. 1Arrowroot thickens at a lower temperature than cornstarch and thins again if held at a boil. Ten minutes of hard boiling will slacken it; bring it just to the boil, cook a minute or two until clear, then add the fruit juice.
Lowney's, a Boston chocolate firm, issued cookbooks that doubled as advertising, and their dessert chapters lean heavily on the sauces that made a plain steamed or baked pudding worth serving. Foamy Sauce No. 2, with its creamed butter and sugar, is close to a hard sauce lightened with egg; Nos. 1 and 3 contain no butter at all. Beating whites to volume by hand cost real labour, which may be why these recipes are so insistent about continuing to beat at every stage.