Cream Sauce
1 egg 1/2 teaspoon vanilla cup milk Beat egg until stiff and add milk, sugar and vanilla, and lastly add cream. UME
This is a foamy, uncooked dessert sauce of the kind ladled over steamed puddings and gingerbread. The egg is never heated at any stage, which is why it cannot be recommended today.
- Raw egg, never cookedThe beaten egg stays raw so the sauce keeps its froth. Nothing in the recipe brings it above room temperature, so Salmonella present in or on the shell egg is carried straight into the finished sauce and served.
- It sits at room temperatureA raw egg-and-dairy mixture whipped full of air and left standing is held in the range where bacteria multiply fastest. Chilling slows that but does not undo it. If you want a pouring sauce for a pudding, use a current recipe for a cooked custard or a pasteurised-egg sabayon.
- Order of workThe egg is beaten stiff first, with the milk, sugar and vanilla added next and the cream last. The recipe does not say whether the cream is whipped.
"Cream sauce" in an American home-cookery book can mean two quite different things depending on where it falls in the index: a savoury white sauce of butter, flour and milk, or -- as the sugar and vanilla here indicate -- an uncooked frothed sauce for puddings. The sweet version belongs to the same family as hard sauce, foamy sauce and the various "pudding dressings" found in dessert chapters of home-cookery compilations, all of them ways of dressing a plain steamed or baked pudding without making a stove-top custard.