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Egg Sauce for Ginger Bread or Pudding
1 egg 1 tsp. vanilla 3/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup boiling milk Beat egg thoroughly, add sugar gradually and beat as long as possible, then add milk and vanilla.
— Mrs. Hiram B. Gibbs
1 lemon
A hard sauce of the beaten-egg school, meant to be spooned over warm gingerbread or a steamed pudding. As written the egg is never cooked, and that is the problem.
- The egg is never brought to temperatureA quarter cup of boiling milk stirred into a whole egg and three-quarters of a cup of sugar cannot raise the mixture anywhere near the 160F needed to pasteurize it. The sugar buffers the protein and the volume of hot liquid is far too small; the finished sauce ends up lukewarm at best. It is a raw-egg sauce, and the method calls for no further cooking.
- Why that matters nowShell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella that a 1900s farm kitchen accepted and modern practice does not. A sauce like this is also typically held on the table through a meal, which is exactly the wrong condition. If you want an egg sauce for gingerbread, use a current recipe built on a cooked custard base or on pasteurized eggs.
- The stray lemonThe trailing "1 lemon" is never mentioned in the method. It may be an orphaned line from an adjoining recipe, or an alternative flavouring to the vanilla; the page does not say.
- Reading the quantitiesThe measures are standard American cups and teaspoons, so no conversion is needed. Three-quarters of a cup of sugar to one egg is very sweet by modern taste.
- "Beat as long as possible"This is the instruction that carried the recipe: the volume and pale colour come entirely from arm work, since there is no cooking and no cream.
- YieldOne egg with this much sugar makes roughly a cup of sauce when well beaten -- enough for a small pan of gingerbread.
Sauces like this belong to the long American tradition of "pudding sauces" -- hard sauce, foamy sauce, egg sauce -- that turned a plain steamed or molasses cake into a dessert without buying cream. The Philathea Cook Book is a church-class fundraiser collection of contributed recipes, Mrs. Hiram B. Gibbs among the contributors. Gingerbread was an everyday cake of the period, cheap in flour and sweetened with molasses rather than sugar, so a sweet white sauce over the top supplied the contrast. Uncooked beaten egg was a common source of lightness in the era before egg-borne illness was widely understood, and sauces of this type turn up in other turn-of-the-century compilations.