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Egg Sauce (Whites of eggs cup water)
Whites of 2 eggs ½ cup water 1 teaspoon vanilla Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the eggs, beaten separately, and the water, boiling hot. Mix all thoroughly; boil over the fire for two or three minutes, stirring constantly, flavor and serve. 1 cup fruit and juice 1/3 cup water
This is a pudding sauce, not a savory egg sauce, and the printed ingredient list has lost part of itself: butter and sugar appear in the method but never in the list. Read the whole thing before starting.
- The missing quantitiesButter and sugar are creamed in the first line but given no amounts. Period sauces of this type generally run about 1/2 cup butter to 1 cup powdered or fine granulated sugar, but the original does not say, and any figure is an inference rather than a conversion.
- The stray fragment"1 cup fruit and juice 1/2 cup water" at the end appears to be the opening of a neighboring recipe that has run on to this page. What dish it belongs to cannot be told from the fragment. It has nothing to do with the egg sauce and should be ignored.
- Whites onlyOnly the whites are used, which is what makes the sauce pale rather than custard-yellow. "Beaten separately" is ambiguous here; with no yolks in play it most likely means the whites are beaten apart from the creamed butter and sugar before being added.
- The hinge: heat controlBoiling-hot water poured onto creamed butter and beaten whites will scramble the egg if it is dumped in at once. Add it in a thin stream while beating, then cook. Constant stirring is not decorative advice; it is the only thing keeping the whites from setting in threads.
- Two or three minutes is generousA butter-based sauce held at a hard rolling boil that long risks breaking and turning grainy as the butter separates. The recipe as printed says to boil it; a cautious cook may prefer to bring it just to the point of thickening over moderate heat and take it off.
- Flavor lastThe instruction reads "flavor and serve," placing the vanilla after the boiling. Vanilla stirred in off the heat keeps more of its aroma; boiled with the sauce, some of it is driven off.
- Yield and serviceThe yield cannot be fixed, since the butter and sugar amounts are missing; the 1.5 cups of water alone puts it at a pint or more. Serve warm, poured over steamed or baked puddings, gingerbread, or plain cake. It will thin as it stands and can be rewarmed gently without boiling.
Sauces like this one belong to the long family of English and American pudding sauces built on creamed butter and sugar, of which hard sauce is a close uncooked relative: the same butter-and-sugar base, here loosened with boiling water and lightened with beaten whites so it can be poured rather than spooned. Recipes calling for whites alone are common in household books of the period. The missing butter and sugar quantities and the orphaned fragment tacked onto the end are printing accidents of the sort these collections accumulated as pages were reset and reordered.