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Creamed Butter Sauce
1 1/2 pounds of powdered sugar. 1/2 pound of butter. 8 whites of eggs 1/2 cup of brandy.
Make the hard sauce as directed in two preceding cases with only one pound of the sugar. Whip the whites quite firm, lightly mix in the remaining sugar, then stir both mixtures together and add the brandy. Make it late and keep on ice till wanted.
This is a brandy hard sauce lightened with raw meringue, and that meringue is the problem: eight egg whites go into the bowl uncooked and stay uncooked, then sit chilled until service. The notes below explain the units and terms and why the method is no longer acceptable.
- Raw egg white, never heatedNothing in the procedure brings the whites above room temperature. Salmonella lives on and in shell eggs and is not destroyed by whipping, by sugar, or by chilling. A cooked meringue or a pasteurised white is the modern answer; a current recipe should be used.
- The brandy does not sterilise anythingHalf a cup of spirit worked into some two and a half pounds of sugar, butter and egg white gives a low alcohol level by volume, far below anything that would inhibit bacterial growth. The brandy here is a flavouring, not a preservative.
- "Make it late and keep on ice"An ice chest ran warmer than a modern refrigerator, commonly cited at around 45-50F, which is well inside the range where an aerated egg-white mixture will grow bacteria over an afternoon's service.
- Powdered sugar meant something elseIn books of this period powdered sugar is cane sugar ground fine, with no anti-caking starch in it. Modern confectioners' sugar carries roughly 3 percent cornstarch, which can dull the gloss of a meringue and thicken the finished sauce.
- "The two preceding cases"The recipe is a variation and cannot be read alone: it depends on hard-sauce instructions given earlier, and only one pound of the sugar is used in that base.
- ScaleA pound and a half of sugar, half a pound of butter and eight whites makes a large quantity of sauce, more than a domestic table would need.
Hard sauce is the English brandy butter of the Christmas pudding table, and creamed or "foamy" versions lightened with beaten whites sit alongside plain and wine-flavoured ones in period collections. The name is a straightforward description — the sauce is served firm and cold against hot steamed pudding, and melts on contact rather than being poured. Aerating it with raw whites or whipped cream lightened a dense, expensive butter-and-sugar paste, and the instruction to "make it late" suggests the foam does not hold for long. In kitchens of this kind the ice chest was the cold storage available, and the microbiological risk of a large bowl of uncooked egg white was not understood as it is now.