Orange Sauce
3 egg whites 1 cup powdered sugar. 2 oranges, juice and rind Juice of 1 lemon Beat whites of eggs until stiff, add sugar and fruit juice, and beat well.
This is a foam or "froth" sauce for puddings, of the kind poured cold over a hot steamed pudding. As printed it cannot be followed safely, and the ingredient list is also incomplete.
- Raw egg white is the problemThe whites go in beaten and are never cooked, warmed, or brought into contact with anything hot. Raw egg white carries a Salmonella risk that cannot be managed by beating or by the acidity of the citrus, and a sauce like this is typically served to whoever is at the table, children and elderly guests included. A current recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked custard base should be used instead.
- The quantities are not all thereNo number of eggs is given, and the printed line breaks have scrambled the order. The cup of water and half cup of sugar are stranded at the end with no instruction attached to them, so even setting safety aside there is no complete method here to follow.
- What the water and sugar were probably forIn similar sauces the water and sugar may have been boiled to a light syrup and beaten into the whites, which would warm and help stabilise the foam. The recipe as printed gives no instruction for them at all, so this is a guess rather than a reading of the text.
- Rind means zest, not peelRind -- "2 oranges, juice and rind" most likely means the coloured outer layer rather than the whole peel, though the recipe does not say how it was to be prepared. The white pith beneath is bitter.
Frothy egg-white sauces were standard equipment in American and British kitchens through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, appearing under names like foam sauce, froth sauce and sometimes "snow" sauce, and they existed because a steamed or boiled pudding is dense and wants something light and sharp against it. Citrus versions were the everyday luxury of the group: a couple of oranges or lemons plus sugar and eggs turned a plain suet or bread pudding into something worth announcing. Booklets titled Reliable Recipes circulated widely in this period, often said to have been issued by manufacturers of baking powder and other grocery goods, and they favoured short, telegraphic instructions on the assumption that any reader already knew how a pudding sauce went together, as here, where the method and the ingredient list have come apart on the page.