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Berry Sauce
2 cups berries
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 tablespoon butter
1 egg-white
1½ cups powdered sugar
The small fruits, such as raspberries, blackberries or strawberries, make most satisfactory sauce for puddings. Place the berries in a bowl, add a tablespoon of granulated sugar and mash slightly to draw out the juices, setting the bowl in a moderately warm room. Beat the butter to a cream, add the powdered sugar and when thoroughly mixed add the beaten white of the egg. Combine with the mashed berries just before serving. Serve with icecream, berry puddings or cottage pudding.
This is a hard sauce — creamed butter and sugar — lightened with raw egg white and folded into crushed berries. The egg white is never cooked, and that is the problem with the recipe as printed.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe beaten white goes into the sauce uncooked and the finished sauce is served cold, so nothing in the method ever brings the egg above room temperature. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and in the white as well as the yolk. Use a current recipe if you want this kind of sauce.
- "Setting the bowl in a moderately warm room"Warmth helped draw juice out of the lightly mashed berries. The egg white is not added until just before serving, so the warm room affects the fruit rather than the egg.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage this is not always today's cornstarch-thickened confectioners' sugar; it often meant a finer grade of ordinary sugar. Either would cream into butter, but modern confectioners' sugar will give a slightly starchier body.
- ProportionsA tablespoon of butter against a cup and a half of sugar is a sugar-heavy hard sauce, not a buttery one.
- What it is meant to accompanyCottage pudding is a plain butter cake baked in a pan and served hot in wedges under sauce.
Pudding sauces occupy their own section in many American household books of this period, when plain steamed and baked puddings were an everyday dessert and the sauce was what varied. Hard sauce — butter creamed with sugar and flavored, then served cold so it melts into a hot pudding — is generally traced to British Christmas pudding practice, where a close relative is still called brandy butter. American cookbooks lightened it in various ways, including with beaten egg white or whipped cream, and this version substitutes soft summer fruit for the more usual brandy or vanilla. The advice that "the small fruits" make the most satisfactory sauce is consistent with a local, seasonal fruit supply: raspberries and blackberries were abundant for a few weeks, and a firmer fruit would not break down under light mashing.