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Apricot-Pineapple Sauce
1/2 cup butter 1½ cups powdered sugar 1/4 1/4 cup apricot pulp 1/4 pineapple (grated) 1 egg white Cream butter, gradually add sugar, then the beaten egg white. Add fruit gradually so that no separation will occur. 1/2 pint cream 1/3 cup sugar
This is a hard sauce in the Victorian and Edwardian style — creamed butter and powdered sugar, spread over hot pudding so it melts into a glaze. The version here binds the butter with raw egg white and is never heated at any stage.
- Why it fails todayThe beaten egg white is folded in raw and the mixture is never heated at any stage. Uncooked egg white carries a Salmonella risk that no amount of sugar or butter neutralises, and a hard sauce of this kind would be served cold or at room temperature rather than hot. If you want a fruit hard sauce, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg or none at all.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period "powdered sugar" generally indicates a finely ground sugar, close to what we now call confectioners' or icing sugar, though the historical grades were not always the same as the modern cornstarch-cut product. A coarse granulated would be more likely to stay gritty in an uncooked sauce.
- Apricot pulpNot jam or preserve. Pulp meant fresh or stewed apricots pressed through a sieve to remove skin and fibre, thick enough to hold its shape on a spoon. Canned apricot flesh, drained hard and sieved, is the nearest modern equivalent.
- Half a pint of creamA pint here is the US 16 fl oz measure, so half a pint is one cup. The cream and the extra third of a cup of sugar are listed after the method with no instructions attached; the likeliest reading is a separately sweetened cream, whipped and either folded in or served alongside, but the book does not say.
- The hinge"Add fruit gradually so that no separation will occur" is the whole technique. Fruit pulp is mostly water; introduced too fast into creamed butter it breaks the emulsion and the sauce weeps. The same caution applies to any butter-and-fruit sauce.
- YieldHalf a cup of butter with a cup and a half of sugar and the fruit makes roughly two cups of sauce; the book gives no yield, and how far it goes depends entirely on how generously it is spooned over the pudding.
Hard sauce — butter beaten with sugar and a flavouring, served cold against a hot pudding — was standard equipment in American and British kitchens through the nineteenth century, most familiar in its brandy-flavoured Christmas form. Community and promotional cookbooks of the early twentieth century, of which Reliable Recipes is one, also published fruit-flavoured variations in place of the spirits: apricot, pineapple, strawberry, orange. Those years were ones in which canned Hawaiian pineapple and California apricots were reaching mainland grocers in tins, though the recipe here calls for grated pineapple, which suggests fresh fruit. Sweetened whipped cream goes into the same bowl.