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Hard Sauce
1/2 cup butter. 2 cups powdered sugar. 1 teaspoon vanilla or whisky. Cream butter until very light, gradually add sugar, then flavoring, and lastly whites of eggs beaten until stiff and dry.
A butter-and-sugar dessert sauce, but this version folds in raw egg whites and is never heated at any stage.
- Why the cautionThe beaten whites go in at the end and the sauce is served cold, so the egg is never brought anywhere near 160F. Raw egg white carries a Salmonella risk, and a sauce that sits at room temperature on a warm pudding gives any bacteria present time to multiply. Use a current hard sauce recipe.
- The quantity is missingWilson calls for "whites of eggs" without saying how many. Comparable sauces of this size often use one or two, but the original text as printed gives no number, so there is no honest conversion.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term could mean a finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. Modern confectioners' sugar dissolves more readily into creamed butter.
- Whisky or vanillaThe book appeared around the start of national Prohibition, though whisky is still offered here as an alternative flavouring. Brandy was the older choice for this sauce.
Hard sauce is often said to take its name from its texture rather than its strength: unlike the thin poured sauces served with puddings, it is creamed firm and chilled until it can be cut or mounded, then left to melt against the hot pudding. The form is generally traced to English kitchens, where the brandy-flavoured version is still called brandy butter and eaten with Christmas pudding and mince pies; American cookbooks adopted it through the nineteenth century and by Mrs. Wilson's day it was a familiar accompaniment to steamed and boiled puddings. Some households enriched the basic butter-and-sugar cream with egg white to lighten it, as here, a habit from a period when eggs were a kitchen staple and raw-egg preparations, from meringues to eggnog, raised no eyebrows. Mrs. Wilson was for years the household editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, and her books read as wartime and post-war economy writing, which is part of why a sauce this rich is given in such spare terms.