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Sabayon Sauce
Put into a stewpan the yolks of eight eggs and one-half pound of powdered sugar, mix well and moisten with one wineglassful of white wine. Place the stewplan over a slow fire and whip the contents continually until it is quite as frothy as whipped cream. It should then be served immediately, either in custard glasses or spread out over the pudding with which it is to be served.
A classic foaming wine custard, written for a coal range where "a slow fire" meant a cooler corner of the stovetop. The whole dish stands or falls on heat control.
- Use a bain-marie"A slow fire" is nearly impossible to reproduce on a modern gas or induction burner without scrambling the yolks. Set a metal or glass bowl over a pan of barely simmering water, the base clear of the water, and whisk without stopping.
- The hinge: temperatureThe foam thickens and sets at roughly 160-180F. Past that the yolks curdle and no amount of whisking brings them back. Pull the bowl off the heat the moment the whisk leaves a trail and the mixture triples in volume, which takes five to eight minutes.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered" usually meant finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Use eight ounces (about one cup) of granulated or caster sugar.
- WineglassfulA wineglass of the era held about two fluid ounces. Two ounces of wine to eight yolks makes a very dense sabayon; four to six ounces gives a looser, frothier result, and Italian zabaglione recipes generally use considerably more wine per yolk.
- The wineAny dry white will work, but Marsala is the traditional choice for zabaglione and gives a rounder flavor. Heavily oaked wines can taste harsh in a warm foam.
- SweetnessEight ounces of sugar to eight yolks is on the heavy side for modern palates, particularly if the sauce is going over an already sweet pudding. Five to six ounces is a reasonable reduction.
- Serve at onceThe instruction is not decorative. The foam begins to weep and collapse within minutes off the heat. If it must wait, whisk it over ice until cold and fold in a little whipped cream, which stabilizes it.
- YieldEight yolks make something approaching a quart of foam when fully whipped, enough for roughly six to eight custard glasses or a sauce for a pudding for eight to ten.
Sabayon is the French rendering of the Italian zabaglione, a whisked custard of yolks, sugar and fortified wine that is generally traced to the Piedmont and Venice, where Marsala eventually became the standard flavoring. By the time Oscar Tschirky was serving as the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel in the 1890s, French service had absorbed it as a warm sauce for puddings and steamed sweets, and the French spelling and dry white wine here reflect that adaptation rather than the Italian original. It belongs to a family of dishes that the restaurant kitchen loved and the home cook feared: no thickener, no flour, nothing but eggs, sugar, wine and the arm of whoever was holding the whisk. Oscar's book is full of such entries, written in shorthand for cooks who already knew what a slow fire looked like.