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Plain Pudding Sauce
To one cupful of sugar add one egg and beat very hard. Add one tablespoonful of boiling water and set on the stove to warm; flavor to taste. A good sauce for almost any pudding.
This is a foam sauce built on a raw egg that the recipe never cooks. Everything else about it is straightforward; the egg is the problem.
- The egg is never cookedOne tablespoon of boiling water stirred into a cup of sugar and a whole egg raises the mixture by a few degrees at most, and "set on the stove to warm" is not a temperature. Egg custards and sauces need to be held long enough at a measured temperature to be safe; nothing here comes close.
- Salmonella riskShell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and within the egg itself. Warming a sauce briefly on the stove will not destroy it, and the sauce is then spooned over pudding and eaten.
- Sugar and beating do not sanitiseThe heavy beating whips air into the egg and the sugar dissolves, which makes the sauce look cooked and thickened. Neither step kills anything; the appearance of a set foam is misleading.
- Who was eating itUndercooked egg carries the greatest consequence for children, convalescents and elderly people, and a sweet pudding sauce is the sort of thing likely to be given to them.
- If you want this sauceUse a current recipe for a stirred custard sauce, where the egg is brought to a measured temperature, or a butter-and-sugar hard sauce, which contains no egg at all.
- On the flavouring"Flavor to taste" in nineteenth-century American cookery commonly meant vanilla, lemon or nutmeg, and sometimes brandy or sherry.
American cookbooks of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carry many such pudding sauces, and they fall into a few families: hard sauce (butter creamed with sugar and spirits), a cornstarch-thickened sweet sauce, a stirred custard, and this kind of beaten-egg foam, which is among the cheapest and quickest of them. Sugar and an egg were staple stores. The instruction to warm the sauce rather than cook it reflects a period in which egg safety was not part of domestic advice; the stated concern in such books is curdling rather than pathogens. The same logic produced the era's uncooked eggnogs and egg lemonades, which have since been reworked in modern practice.