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Strawberry Sauce
1/3 cup butter 2/3 cup strawberries 1 cup powdered sugar White 1 egg Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, egg beaten until stiff, and strawberries. Beat until fruit is mashed. Creamy Sauce I 1/4 cup butter 2 tablespoons milk 3/4 cup powdered sugar 2 tablespoons wine Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and milk and wine drop by drop. If liquids are added too fast the sauce will by drop. If liquids are added too fast the sauce will have a curdled appearance.
Two sauces have been run together in this page, and the first of them depends on raw egg white that is never heated at any stage.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe strawberry sauce is creamed cold and served cold onto pudding; the beaten white of one egg is eaten uncooked. Raw shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella, and nothing in this method — no heat, no acid strong enough, no long cure — reduces it. A current recipe using pasteurised egg white, or none at all, should be used instead.
- Two recipes, one paragraph"Creamy Sauce I" is a separate entry that has collapsed into the same block of text, and its final sentence appears twice in this transcription. It contains no egg; the strawberry sauce above it does.
- Powdered sugarIn Farmer's usage powdered sugar is a fine-grained granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and behaves differently when creamed.
- "Wine" in a pudding sauceFor sauces of this period this generally means sherry, Madeira or a sweet white; the recipe itself specifies only "wine."
- YieldNo yield is stated. Creamy Sauce I works out at roughly a cup; the strawberry sauce, with more butter, more sugar, the berries and a beaten white, makes appreciably more.
Sauces like these belong to the long American tradition of "hard sauce" — butter creamed with sugar and a flavouring, served cold in a spoonful on top of a hot steamed or baked pudding, so that it melts as it goes to the table. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives a run of them together, differing only in what is beaten into the butter: wine, milk, lemon, or in this case crushed strawberries, with a stiff egg white for lightness. The egg white was a period trick for volume, used freely at a time when raw eggs in cold desserts, from ambrosia to boiled frostings, raised no eyebrows. The pudding chapter that surrounds it reflects a kitchen with a steady coal range and only the cooling an icebox could offer, which is precisely why the raw-egg version reads differently now than it did then.