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Foamy Sauce II
Whites 2 eggs 1/4 cup hot milk 1 cup powdered sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla Beat eggs until stiff, add sugar gradually, and continue beating; add milk and vanilla.
A pudding sauce from the era when uncooked egg white was a standard thickener for sweet sauces. The technique is sound; the food safety is not, and one line of the printed text appears to be a compositor's error.
- Why this one failsThe two egg whites are never cooked. A quarter cup of hot milk beaten into a stiff, cold meringue drops well below any pasteurizing temperature within seconds, and the sauce is served immediately afterward. Shell eggs carry a real risk of Salmonella, and the whites here get no heat treatment at all.
- Hot pudding does not fix itThe sauce is spooned over the pudding at the table, not baked into it. Contact with a warm cake surface for a minute or two does not bring the interior of an aerated foam to a safe temperature. If you want a foamy pudding sauce, use a current recipe built on a cooked custard base or on pasteurized whites.
- The stray "2 cups milk"The line at the end belongs to no step in the method and does not match the 1/4 cup of hot milk called for above. It looks like a stray fragment of an adjacent recipe carried over in the printed or transcribed text. Do not read it as a second addition of milk.
- "Powdered sugar" in 1896"Powdered sugar" -- In nineteenth-century American usage "powdered sugar" generally meant a grade milled finer than granulated, not the cornstarch-cut XXXX confectioners' sugar now sold under that name.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half to two cups of sauce, depending on how far the whites are beaten; enough for several servings of a plain baked or steamed pudding.
Foamy sauce belongs to the family of soft, aerated dessert sauces that nineteenth-century American cooks poured over plain steamed and baked puddings, alongside hard sauce, creamy sauce and the various wine and lemon sauces that fill this section of the book. The plain puddings themselves were cheap flour-and-milk affairs, and the sauce carried the flavour. Versions built on uncooked egg white persisted in American cookbooks well into the twentieth century, before routine warnings about egg-borne illness pushed such sauces toward cooked or pasteurized bases.