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Fruit Sauce
1/3 cup butter 1 cup fresh strawberries, raspberries or canned fruit drained from syrup 1 cup powdered sugar white 1 egg Cream butter; add sugar gradually; add egg beaten until stiff and beat well; add fruit which has been carefully prepared and mashed. Beat until smooth and creamy.
This is a fruit-flavoured hard sauce of the kind spooned over hot doughnuts, puddings and gingerbread. It is never cooked, and the raw egg white in it is the problem.
- Raw egg white, never heatedRaw egg, never heated -- The transcription runs the ingredients together, and the line may be "1 cup powdered sugar, white of 1 egg" — the white alone, beaten stiff and folded in raw — or a whole egg added to white powdered sugar. Either way nothing in the method brings the sauce above room temperature, so any Salmonella present in or on the shell egg stays present in the finished sauce.
- Why it mattered less in 1900Why the risk reads differently now -- When eggs were likelier to come from a local source and the sauce was made and eaten at once, the exposure was shorter. Modern shell eggs move through a longer chain, and uncooked egg is a recognised vehicle for egg-borne illness in sauces, mousses and icings. A current recipe using pasteurised egg or a cooked base should be used instead.
- Sitting time makes it worseIf the sauce is made ahead and left out through a meal, as hard sauces often are, an uncooked egg held at room temperature for an hour or more is exactly the condition that lets a small bacterial load become a large one.
- Powdered sugar"Powdered sugar" in books of this period is not always the modern confectioners' or icing sugar; it could also mean a sugar ground finer than granulated. Modern icing sugar is the usual substitute.
- The fruitFresh berries mashed into a butter-and-sugar base weep quickly, and canned fruit drained from syrup carries more liquid than it looks. Neither changes the safety question; both mean the sauce breaks if it stands.
Hard sauce — butter creamed with sugar and a flavouring, served cold against something hot — is a British inheritance that American cookbooks absorbed, best known as the brandy butter set beside a Christmas pudding. Family and temperance-minded cookery books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often flavoured it with fruit, vanilla or lemon in place of spirits. If the egg here is the white, beaten stiff and folded in, it works as a lightener, turning a dense butter paste into something closer to a foam, as in other "fluffy" and "creamy" hard sauces of the period.