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Foamy Sauce
Beat the whites of three eggs to a stiff froth, melt one teacup of sugar in three tablespoons of water, let it boil till it thickens, stir in one small glass of wine, then the beaten whites. Serve with steamed or baked puddings.
This is an Italian-meringue sauce under an older name: hot sugar syrup beaten into egg whites, loosened with wine. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the temperature of the syrup.
- Cook the syrup to a measurable stage"Boil till it thickens" is usually read as the soft-ball stage, around 238-240F on a candy thermometer, though a syrup that has merely begun to thicken may be a few degrees short of that. It takes only a few minutes with one cup of sugar and three tablespoons of water. Under-cooked syrup gives a soupy sauce that weeps within minutes; over-cooked syrup sets into threads on contact with the cold whites.
- A teacup of sugarNineteenth-century teacups ran smaller than modern mugs, generally reckoned at 3/4 cup, though the books are inconsistent. Three-quarters of a cup of granulated sugar to three tablespoons water is the safer reading; a full cup will need a spoonful more water to dissolve.
- A small glass of wineRoughly 2 fluid ounces. Sherry, Madeira or a sweet white were the usual choices for pudding sauces. Brandy works if you cut it to a tablespoon or so.
- Reverse the order of assemblyRather than stirring the whites into the pan, pour the boiling syrup in a thin stream into the whites while beating steadily, then beat in the wine at the end. Adding cold wine to the syrup first drops its temperature and the foam will be less stable.
- Egg whites and heatSyrup at 240F poured slowly over beating whites brings them to somewhere near 160F, which is the point of the method, but this is not reliable pasteurization, and as written the recipe cools the syrup with wine before the whites go in. If your syrup runs cool or you are cooking for anyone vulnerable, use pasteurized whites, which whip perfectly well for this.
- Holding and servingServe warm, within twenty minutes or so. It can be kept over a pan of hot (not simmering) water and given a quick whisk before it goes to the table; refrigeration dulls it and it will weep.
- YieldThree whites and this much sugar give about 3 cups of light foam, enough for six to eight servings of a steamed pudding.
Foamy sauce, along with hard sauce and its cousins, belonged to the era when a steamed or baked pudding was a familiar way to close a substantial dinner and was expected to arrive under something rich. The technique here is the one confectioners call Italian meringue: boiling syrup cooks and stabilizes beaten whites so they hold air without the oven. Butterick, a pattern company whose cookbook sat alongside its dressmaking guides in American households around the turn of the twentieth century, sets the method down with great brevity. The wine is characteristic of the period's pudding sauces, where sherry or Madeira served much as vanilla extract would later.