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Berry Sauce
2 cups berries 1 tablespoon butter 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar 1 tablespoon granulated sugar 1 egg-white The small fruits, such as raspberries, blackberries or strawberries, make most satisfactory sauce for puddings. Place the berries in a bowl, add a tablespoon of granulated sugar and mash slightly to draw out the juices, setting the bowl in a moderately warm room. Beat the butter to a cream, add the powdered sugar and when thoroughly mixed add the beaten white of the egg. Combine with the mashed berries just before serving. Serve with ice-cream, berry puddings or cottage pudding.
A creamed butter-and-sugar sauce lightened with raw egg white and folded into crushed berries. The method is sound in outline, but the egg white is never cooked or otherwise treated, and the mixture is deliberately held at room temperature before serving.
- Why it fails: uncooked egg whiteThe beaten white goes into the sauce raw and the sauce is served raw. Salmonella can be present in and on shell eggs, and nothing in this recipe — no heat, no acid strong enough, no alcohol — reduces it. A foam of raw white folded into sweetened butter also has no protective barrier at all.<br>A current pudding-sauce recipe worked out for pasteurized egg product, or one that omits the egg, should be used instead.
- Why it fails: warm holdingWarm holding -- The berries are mashed with sugar and set aside "in a moderately warm room", with no limit given on how long the bowl stands; the egg mixture is combined only just before serving, so the warm interval applies to the fruit rather than to the egg. The finished sauce is nonetheless assembled and served without chilling.
- Powdered sugarIn an American book of this date this means confectioners' or icing sugar, fine enough to cream into butter, and by then often blended with a little cornstarch. It is not the coarser grade that the word "powdered" denoted in earlier nineteenth-century usage.
- Proportions to noteOne tablespoon of butter to 1 1/2 cups of confectioners' sugar is far more sugar than a creamed sauce will carry smoothly; the mixture is essentially a stiff sweet paste that the egg white and berry juice are meant to loosen. The result is very sweet by modern standards even before the fruit sugar is counted.
- YieldNot stated in the original; the quantities suggest roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups, depending on how far the berries break down.
The New Delineator Recipes came out of the test kitchens attached to The Delineator, a Butterick magazine that ran from the 1870s into the 1930s and reached American housewives alongside the company's dress patterns. A chapter of pudding sauces was standard in such books because the puddings themselves were plain and cheap — cottage pudding is little more than a butter cake baked in a pan — and the sauce did the work of making dessert feel finished. This formula sits in the family of "hard sauces," creamed butter and sugar served cold, which in English and American cookery were often flavoured with brandy or rosewater; lightening the paste with beaten egg white and thinning it with crushed fruit is a variation that appears in books of this period. Raw egg white was used as an aerator in cold sauces, icings and frappés in these books without comment.