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Strawberry or Raspberry Sauce
¼ cup butter or butter sub- 1 egg-white stitute
1 cup strawberries or rasp- 1 cup powdered sugar berries
Cream the butter or butter substitute, add the sugar gradually, the stiffly beaten egg-whites, and the mashed berries. Beat until well mixed and foamy. A little lemon-juice will improve the flavor.
PASTRY
This is an uncooked foamy sauce in the hard-sauce family, and nothing in it is ever heated. That is the problem.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe beaten white goes into a cold butter-and-sugar base and the mixture is never heated at any stage. Nothing in the method brings the egg anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the sugar and butter do nothing to make it safe.
- No acid or heat step to fall back onThe optional lemon juice is a flavour note, not a treatment; a teaspoon or so of juice in a cup of sugar and butter will not meaningfully reduce risk. Unlike a custard sauce, there is no stage in this recipe where the mixture could be brought to temperature.
- "Butter substitute"In a book of this period this most likely means oleomargarine, then made largely from beef fat or coconut and cottonseed oils. Offering the swap in the ingredient line itself was a common cookbook convention.
- Powdered sugarIn modern usage this is confectioners' sugar, ground fine and cut with a little starch, though in books of this period the term could also mean a finely ground granulated sugar. A fine sugar suits a sauce that is never heated.
- YieldA quarter cup of butter, a cup of sugar and a cup of fruit, beaten to a foam, makes roughly two cups of sauce.
Butterick was a dress-pattern company that expanded into domestic publishing, and its household volumes were sold to the same middle-class readers who bought its patterns and magazines. Uncooked foamy sauces of this kind are usually traced to English hard sauce, the creamed butter-and-sugar mixture served with plum pudding, with lighter American versions adding beaten egg white and mashed fruit.