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Aple Jelly Sauce for Fruit Pudding
2 egg whites. 1/2 glass apple jelly. 2 tablespoons sugar. Beat eggs stiff with sugar, add jelly and beat all until very light.
This is a raw-egg foam sauce with no cooking step at any point, which is the reason it should not be made from these directions.
- Nothing is ever heatedThe whites are beaten with sugar and jelly and served as-is over pudding. There is no custard stage, no double boiler, and no residual heat from the pudding sufficient to bring the egg to a safe temperature.
- The specific riskUncooked egg white can carry Salmonella from the shell or the interior of the egg. Sugar and fruit jelly do not acidify or preserve the foam to any meaningful degree, and whipping only aerates it.
- It also sitsIt may also stand -- nothing in the recipe says when the sauce is beaten, but a foam sauce of this kind can easily be made in advance and left at room temperature while the pudding is served, which is poor conditions for an uncooked egg mixture.
- "1/2 glass" is unmeasurableA "glass" in books of this period usually means a jelly tumbler, but the size is nowhere fixed in the text; half a glass could be anywhere from a scant quarter-cup to half a cup, and the quantity is a guess either way.
- If you want this sauceUse a current recipe for a cooked fruit foam or a Swiss-meringue-style sauce, where the egg and sugar are held at a stated temperature before whipping.
Uncooked whipped-egg sauces of this kind were standard nursery and family cookery in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a jar of apple or currant jelly was the cheapest flavouring in the house and a beaten white was the cheapest way to make a small quantity of it stretch over a steamed pudding. Mary A. Wilson, whose columns are usually associated with the Philadelphia Public Ledger, built her reputation on wartime and post-war economy, and this sauce is exactly that thinking: two whites, two spoons of sugar, and jelly already on the shelf, no fuel used. The book was assembled largely from her newspaper columns. Raw egg seems to have raised little concern at the time; the shift away from it came only with the documented rise of egg-associated Salmonella in the later twentieth century.