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Cream Sauce II
1 egg 1 cup powdered sugar 1/2 cup thick cream 1/4 cup milk ½ teaspoon vanilla Beat white of egg until stiff; add yolk of egg well beaten, and sugar gradually; dilute cream with milk, beat until stiff, combine mixtures, and flavor.
Yellow Sauce I 2 eggs 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla or ½ teaspoon vanilla and 1 teaspoon brandy Beat eggs until very light, add sugar gradually and continue beating; then flavor. 2 eggs
This is an uncooked foam sauce for hot puddings, and the whole of it — white, yolk, cream and sugar — goes to the table without ever meeting heat. That is the problem.
- Raw egg, never heatedBoth the white and the yolk are beaten in raw and the sauce is served as is. Nothing in the method brings the egg above room temperature, and the sugar and small amount of vanilla provide no meaningful antimicrobial effect. Modern shell eggs carry a real risk of Salmonella Enteritidis, and cooked custard sauces or pasteurized eggs are now recommended in place of this style of sauce.
- The hot pudding does not cook itSpooning the sauce over a steamed or baked pudding warms the surface for a few seconds at most. It does not hold the egg anywhere near the temperature and time needed to make it safe, and the sauce is meant to stay foamy rather than set.
- Who is most at riskAnyone pregnant, very young, elderly, or immunocompromised should not eat uncooked-egg sauces at all.
- The second recipe on the pageYellow Sauce I is the same problem in a plainer form — two eggs, sugar, flavoring, no cooking step whatsoever. It fails for the same reason and should not be made either.
- What to make insteadIf you want a foamy sauce for a hot pudding, use a current recipe for a cooked custard or sabayon-style sauce, or a hard sauce of butter and sugar, which contains no egg at all.
- Reading the ingredient list"Powdered sugar" in books of this period generally means a finely granulated sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar; "thick cream" means heavy cream. The stray "2 eggs" at the end appears to belong to the sauce that follows rather than to either recipe above.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book includes a run of sauces for hot puddings, broadly of three kinds: hard sauces creamed from butter and sugar, cooked sauces thickened with flour or cornstarch, and uncooked foam sauces built on beaten egg. An uncooked sauce of this kind needs no fire and no watching. Salmonella Enteritidis became widespread in commercial laying stock only in the later twentieth century, and uncooked-egg sauces became much less common in mainstream American cookbooks over the same period.