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Cream Sauce
2 eggs. 1 cup sugar. 1 lemon. 1 cup grated apple.
Beat the yolks and sugar, add rind and juice of lemon, then the beaten whites and the apple gradually. Cook three minutes over boiling water, stirring constantly.
Despite the title and its placement among the vegetables, this is a sweet foam sauce for pudding — an apple-lemon variant of what older books call a hard or froth sauce. The text as printed almost certainly belongs to a dessert section and has drifted here in setting.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockThree minutes over boiling water is not long enough to guarantee anything with a mixture this thick. Hold it at a bare simmer beneath, stirring, until it registers 160F on an instant-read thermometer and coats the spoon; that may take eight to ten minutes.
- Double boiler, and never direct heat"Over boiling water" means a bowl set above simmering water, not touching it. Egg yolk sets at around 150F and the sugar only buys a little slack; put the pan on the burner and you get scrambled sweet egg.
- Grate the apple lastA cup of grated apple browns within minutes and weeps juice that thins the sauce. Grate a firm tart apple — Granny Smith, Braeburn — directly into the lemon juice, which both slows the oxidation and keeps the colour pale.
- "1 lemon" in 1920"1 lemon" -- lemon size varies widely, so treat the single fruit as approximate: figure about 3 tablespoons juice and 2 teaspoons finely grated zest; if your lemon gives more than 4 tablespoons, hold some back or the sauce will not thicken.
- Fold, do not beat, the whitesWhip them to soft peaks and add them gently. Note that the recipe as printed directs constant stirring after the whites go in, which will knock much of the air back out; handling them more gently preserves more volume.
- SweetnessA full cup of sugar to two eggs is very sweet by current taste. Two-thirds of a cup still stabilises the yolks and reads better alongside anything already sweetened.
- Yield and servingAbout two cups, enough for six servings. Serve warm and within the hour — on standing it separates, and reheating breaks it.
Mrs. Wilson's book comes out of the American home-economics movement at its most confident: Mary A. Wilson was associated with the U.S. Food Administration during the First World War, and her writing carries that period's habit of thrift and substitution. Sauces of this kind — beaten egg, sugar, an acid fruit, cooked briefly over water — were the standard finish for the steamed and boiled puddings that filled the last page of a plain dinner, and they cost almost nothing beyond two eggs. The apple does the work that cream or butter would do in a richer household, giving body and bulk without dairy, which is very much the logic of wartime and immediately postwar cookery.