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Berry Sauce
The small fruits, such as raspberries, blackberries or strawberries, make most satisfactory sauce for puddings. One pint of berries; one and one-half cups of powdered sugar; one tablespoon of butter; one egg. 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 moderate heat. Beat the butter to a cream, add the powdered sugar and when thoroughly mixed add the beaten white of the egg. Add the mashed berries just before serving. Serve with ice cream or berry puddings.
This is a creamed hard sauce folded with crushed berries, and the egg white in it is never cooked at any stage. A few notes on the period language follow, but the sauce should not be made from these directions.
- The raw egg white is the problemThe white is beaten and folded into creamed butter and sugar, then served cold over pudding or ice cream. Nothing in the method brings it near the 160F usually cited for killing Salmonella. Use a current recipe for a foamy or hard pudding sauce instead.
- No cooking step exists at allNo cooking step reaches the egg -- Unlike a custard sauce or a sabayon, which are held over hot water until thickened, the butter, sugar and egg white here are creamed cold. The only warming in the recipe is applied to the berries, and they are added at the last moment.
- "Powdered sugar" in 1911"Powdered sugar" -- In period usage powdered sugar usually meant a finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today, which can affect the texture of a creamed sauce. The recipe separately calls for a tablespoon of ordinary granulated sugar on the berries, to draw out their juice.
- "Setting the bowl in a moderate heat"This points to the back or edge of the range rather than an oven with a number. It is a warming instruction meant to loosen the juice from the fruit; no temperature is given, and a coal range offered no way to set one.
- ProportionsA pint of berries to a cup and a half of sugar and only one tablespoon of butter makes this much looser and sweeter than the classic butter-heavy hard sauce; it is closer to a fruit fool poured over the pudding than to a firm pat of brandy butter.
- YieldThe original gives none, and no serving count can be inferred from the text.
Sweet butter-and-sugar sauces beaten cold and served over hot puddings are an English inheritance, known in the United States as hard sauce and familiar there chiefly as the accompaniment to plum pudding. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, put out household manuals aimed at the middle-class woman running a house without a large staff, and here the same creamed base is flavoured with fresh soft fruit. Adding a beaten egg white to lighten such a sauce appears without comment because the hazard was not yet understood; the shift in advice about raw egg is a twentieth-century development, tied to changes in poultry farming and to the identification of Salmonella enteritidis in intact shell eggs. The reliance on raspberries, blackberries and strawberries interchangeably also marks the recipe as seasonal writing, from a period when soft fruit was a summer event rather than a year-round import.