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Foamy Sauce
1/2 cup butter. 1 cup powdered sugar. 1 tablespoon Webb's vanilla. 2 tablespoons sherry wine. 1/2 cup boiling water. 1 egg white beaten stiff. Cream butter and sugar, add vanilla and wine. Just before serving add boiling water, stir well, then add whites, beat all into foam and serve at once.
A pudding sauce of the hard-sauce family, lightened at the last moment with beaten egg white. The construction is sound, but the egg never reaches a temperature that would make it safe by current standards.
- The egg white is never cookedThe half cup of boiling water goes into a cold mass of creamed butter and sugar and loses its heat immediately; the stiffly beaten white is folded in afterward and served at once. Nothing in the method brings the egg anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella is reliably killed, and this is a sauce meant to be spooned over hot pudding by everyone at the table, including children and the elderly. A current recipe built on pasteurized whites, or a cooked foamy sauce beaten over hot water, should be used instead.
- Powdered sugarConfectioners' sugar. Powdered sugar of the period was sold both with and without added cornstarch; where starch is present it is a small proportion, and any effect on the body of the sauce would be slight.
- Webb's vanillaA commercial extract of the day. Brand names appear elsewhere in the book, though the reason is not documented. Any good vanilla extract stands in, and a tablespoon is a generous quantity for a sauce of this size.
- SherryTwo tablespoons; the recipe does not specify a style.
- Yield and servingRoughly two cups, enough for six to eight servings. Foamy sauce collapses within a few minutes, which is the point of the instruction to serve at once.
- Filed under VegetablesIf the section heading reads so, it is an artifact of the book's layout rather than a description of the dish. This is a sweet sauce for steamed and baked puddings.
Foamy sauce is the aerated cousin of hard sauce, the butter-and-sugar paste that English and American cooks had been serving with plum pudding since at least the nineteenth century. The difference is timing: hard sauce is made in advance and served cold in a firm mound, while foamy sauce is whipped up at the last second with boiling water and beaten egg white so that it arrives at the table still expanding. It belongs to the long era of steamed and boiled puddings, when a household dessert was often a plain heavy thing whose interest came almost entirely from what was poured over it. Mrs. Mary A. Wilson, who wrote for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and worked in food conservation during the First World War, published her New Cook Book in the early 1920s, and it carries both brand-name references and small quantities of wine.