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Orange Sauce
2 cups XXXX sugar. Juice of 2 oranges, grated rind of one. 1/2 cup butter. 4 egg whites.
Cream butter and sugar, add two tablespoons cream, stir over hot water until well blended. Add orange and grated rind. If you want cold sauce, add the beaten whites after cooling; if hot, add at once. Pineapple and lemon sauce may be made the same way.
A soft pudding sauce in the older style, whose method leaves four egg whites uncooked. The notes below explain the terms and the problem.
- Why it failsThe four egg whites are folded in either after the base has cooled or into a warm butter-and-sugar mixture straight off the hot water. Neither route brings the whites anywhere near a temperature that would destroy Salmonella; a warm sugar-butter base has nowhere near the heat or the contact time to pasteurize roughly half a cup of raw white. The sauce is then served without any further cooking, unlike a meringue or a baked pudding.
- Not a cooked custard"Stir over hot water until well blended" applies only to the butter, sugar and cream. There is no stage at which the finished sauce is held at temperature, so nothing in the method covers the eggs. For a foamy orange dessert sauce, use a current recipe that either cooks the egg to temperature or specifies pasteurized whites.
- XXXX sugarTrade shorthand for a grade of powdered sugar (4X), of the type sold today as confectioners' or icing sugar; finer grades such as 6X and 10X also exist. Modern confectioners' sugar contains a little cornstarch as an anti-caking agent.
- Grated rindCitrus of this period was generally less heavily coated and treated than supermarket fruit is now, and rind was grated straight from the fruit. Modern citrus intended for zest should be unwaxed or well scrubbed.
- Amounts and yieldTwo cups of sugar to half a cup of butter and four whites makes a large quantity of very sweet sauce, enough for several servings of steamed pudding or plain cake; the recipe gives no yield. The "two tablespoons cream" is the only liquid besides the orange juice, so the base is closer to a soft frosting than a pouring sauce.
Mrs. Wilson's book comes out of the years just after the First World War, when Mary A. Wilson was writing household food columns for a Philadelphia readership, and it carries the older American habit of serving plain boiled, steamed and baked puddings with a sweet sauce made separately at the last minute. Sauces of this family are close kin to hard sauce, which is simply creamed butter and sugar; the additions of citrus juice, a spoonful of cream, and beaten whites make it lighter and stretch a small amount of butter further, which mattered when dairy prices were high. The closing line, that pineapple and lemon may be handled the same way, is characteristic of the book's method-first approach: learn one formula and vary the flavoring with whatever fruit is at hand.