Home › Desserts › Strawberry Sauce
Strawberry Sauce
cup butter 1 cup strawberries 1 cup powdered sugar 1 beaten egg white Cream butter; add sugar, egg white; beat well; add strawberries crushed to a pulp. Serve.
This is a fruit hard sauce of the kind spooned over steamed puddings and cottage pudding, and it is built on an uncooked egg white that never sees heat at any point.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe beaten white is folded into cold creamed butter and sugar and served as is. Nothing in the method brings the egg to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the sauce sits at room temperature on warm pudding, which is favourable to bacterial growth rather than against it. A current recipe should be used instead.
- Who it was served toWho it might have been served to -- Fruit hard sauces of this type were served over steamed and baked puddings generally, and such puddings were common nursery and sickroom food, though this recipe carries no such direction. Children, older adults, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised are precisely the groups for whom raw egg carries the greatest risk, which is worth knowing before treating the recipe as merely quaint.
- The butter quantity is missingThe line reads "cup butter" with no figure, most likely a fraction lost in reproduction. What that fraction was cannot be recovered from the text as it stands.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term generally meant finely ground white sugar rather than the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar standard today, though usage was not uniform. Substituting the modern product may thicken the sauce a little more.
- Why the fruit goes in lastStrawberry juice is largely water, and water can break a creamed butter mixture. The order given hen crushed fruit, keeps that risk to a minimum, and the same sequence is common in other fruit hard sauces.
- YieldCannot be stated precisely, since the butter quantity is missing from the text; the cup of sugar and cup of crushed strawberries alone suggest a sauce for several servings of pudding at a tablespoon or two each.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston to sell chocolate, and like other house cookbooks it padded the branded recipes with a full domestic repertoire — hence a strawberry sauce in the dessert chapter with no chocolate in sight. Uncooked butter-and-sugar sauces, generally traced to English hard sauce served with plum pudding, were a standard American finish for steamed and baked puddings, and the beaten egg white was the period's way of lightening the mixture to something spoonable without cream or cooking. Foamy sauce, snow sauce and various fruit hard sauces all worked from the same base, varied by whatever was in season; strawberries, being the first soft fruit of the year, were a natural candidate for such sauces. The egg went in raw, which says a good deal about how differently household eggs were understood before commercial-scale production and modern pathogen surveillance.