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Vanilla Sauce
Three tablespoons of sugar; three tablespoons of milk; one egg; vanilla to taste. Beat the white of the egg stiff, add the sugar, mix well and add the yolk of the egg, then the milk and flavoring, beating after each is added until the whole is smooth. This sauce is delicious on almost any pudding.
This is an uncooked egg foam: white beaten stiff, sugar and yolk folded in, milk added, served straight onto pudding. Nothing in the method brings the egg or the milk to a safe temperature, and that is the whole problem with it.
- The egg is never cookedBoth white and yolk go into the sauce raw and stay raw. There is no custard stage, no double boiler, and no hot pudding hot enough to reliably pasteurise a spoonful of sauce poured over it. Salmonella in shell eggs is the specific risk, and it is not addressed anywhere in the method.
- Nothing else in the bowl protects itThree tablespoons of sugar in a sauce this size is far too little to act as a preservative, and there is no alcohol, no acid and no heat. Compare the old brandy-based hard sauces, where spirit and a large weight of sugar do at least some work; here the egg is simply suspended in milk.
- Milk added raw as wellThe milk goes in unheated, and in the period much household milk was not pasteurised. Even with modern pasteurised milk, adding it cold to a raw-egg foam gives a liquid that will sit at room temperature on a warm pudding while people finish their plates.
- Who it fails hardestUncooked-egg sauces are specifically discouraged for children, older adults, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised, which is a fair share of the people a pudding sauce gets served to.
- If you want a vanilla sauceUse a current recipe for a cooked vanilla custard sauce or a stirred crème anglaise, where the egg is taken to temperature and held there. Do not attempt to patch this one.
- Reading the quantitiesFor the record, the tablespoons here are close enough to modern ones, and the sauce as written makes only a small quantity -- a few spoonfuls each for two or three people once the white has been beaten up.
Foamy uncooked sauces of egg, sugar and flavouring were a standing feature of American pudding chapters from the mid-nineteenth century onward, sitting alongside hard sauce, liquid sauce and cooked custard sauce. They were popular for a practical reason: they took a minute, used what was already in the house, and turned a plain steamed or boiled pudding into something that looked dressed. Routine warnings about uncooked eggs belong to a much later era of food safety, which is why a recipe like this one reads as ordinary in its own pages and unusable in ours.