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Orange Sauce (Whites eggs Juice and rind)
Whites 3 eggs Juice and rind 2 oranges 1 cup powdered sugar Juice 1 lemon Beat whites until stiff, add sugar gradually, and continue beating; add rind and fruit juices.
This is an uncooked foam sauce: three raw egg whites, sugar and citrus juice, served as-is over hot pudding. Nothing in the method brings the eggs to a safe temperature, and that is the problem.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites are beaten and served without cooking. Salmonella can be present in the white as well as the yolk, and beating in sugar and citrus does not pasteurise anything. Acid at this concentration is not a kill step.
- The pudding's heat does not helpSpooning cold foam onto a hot pudding at the table warms it by a few degrees at most, and only where it touches. Historic sauces of this type were sometimes set over hot water and stirred to a custard; this one is not.
- Who is most at riskUncooked egg dishes are specifically advised against for young children, pregnant women, the elderly and anyone immune-compromised.
- Volume, if you are reading it as historyThree whites beaten stiff with a cup of powdered sugar will yield roughly two to three cups of foam, enough to dress a pudding for several people. A sugared white foam of this kind will slacken and weep fairly quickly on standing.
- "Powdered sugar" in 1896"Powdered sugar" in a book of this period -- Not today's cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Nineteenth-century powdered sugar was loaf sugar crushed fine — nearer to superfine or caster sugar than to modern confectioners'.
- If you want an orange sauceUse a current recipe: either a cooked citrus custard or sabayon taken to temperature, or a foam built on pasteurised whites. Do not adapt this one by eye.
Cookbooks of this period carry a long file of pudding sauces — hard sauce, foamy sauce, wine sauce, lemon and orange sauces — served with plain steamed and baked batter puddings, where the sauce supplied the flavour and sugar. Beaten-white sauces of this kind were often called "foamy" or "snow" sauces, and they belonged to a period when raw egg appeared without comment in dishes from eggnog to boiled dressing. Modern commercial egg handling and the understanding of Salmonella in shell eggs both belong to the twentieth century, well after this page was written; the recipe is not careless by the standards of its own day, it simply predates the knowledge that would have changed it.