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Yellow Sauce II
1 cup powdered sugar 3 tablespoons wine Beat yolks of eggs until thick, add one-half the sugar gradually; beat whites of eggs until stiff, add gradually remaining sugar; combine mixtures, and add wine.
This is a raw-egg foam sauce, spooned over hot puddings and never cooked at any stage. The points below explain why it falls outside current food-safety practice and note some quirks of the text itself.
- The eggs are never heatedBoth yolks and whites go into the sauce raw and stay raw; the only warmth they ever meet is the pudding underneath, which is nowhere near hot enough for long enough to matter. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella both on the shell and within the yolk, and a cold foam gives it every advantage.
- The wine does not sterilise anythingThree tablespoons of sherry or Madeira in a cup-plus of sugar and egg is far too dilute, and far too briefly in contact, to inactivate bacteria. Alcohol in a dessert sauce is a flavouring, not a safety step.
- Who it is most dangerous forUncooked egg sauces are specifically advised against for children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised — which is much of the audience for a nursery pudding sauce. If you want a wine sauce of this type, use a current recipe for a cooked sabayon or a pasteurised-egg version.
- The ingredient list is incompleteAs printed, the eggs are missing from the list entirely and appear only in the method, with no number given. The page itself does not say how many, and that ambiguity is worth noting rather than papering over.
- "Wine" means a fortified wine"Wine" probably means a fortified wine -- An unqualified "wine" in a dessert sauce of this period usually meant sherry, Madeira or port rather than table wine, though the recipe itself does not specify.
- Powdered sugarIn nineteenth-century usage this generally meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name today. The two behave differently in an egg foam.
Yellow Sauce belongs to a family of egg-and-wine dessert sauces that runs from Italian zabaglione and French sabayon through the English and American "wine sauce" served over steamed and boiled puddings. Fannie Farmer's Hot Puddings chapter assumes a household turning out cottage puddings, batter puddings and steamed suet puddings through the winter, all of which arrive at the table plain and want something poured over them; the book accordingly offers a rack of them — hard sauce, foamy sauce, creamy sauce, several wine sauces — as interchangeable finishes. Uncooked versions like this one survived in print well into the twentieth century, made minutes before serving from eggs that were, in principle, very fresh — an assumption commercial egg supply and modern understanding of Salmonella have both since undone.