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Vanilla Sauce
Pour one pint of milk into a saucepan and put in a vanilla been and sugar to taste; boil it and then remove the saucepan from the fire. Beat the yolks of three eggs with two tablespoonfuls of flour and add them to the milk; stir the sauce over a slow fire until thick, but do not allow it to boil. Whip the whites of three eggs to a still froth with one tablespoonful of sugar, mix of froth with the sauce, and serve.
A flour-stabilized custard sauce lightened with meringue at the last moment. The whole thing turns on temperature control at one point in the process.
- Never let it boilOnce the yolks go in, hold the sauce below a simmer, around 170-180F. Boiling scrambles the yolks into grains no amount of whisking will smooth, and the flour is there to buy you margin, not immunity.
- Temper the eggsThe instruction to "add them to the milk" glosses over the step that saves the sauce: whisk a ladleful of the hot infused milk into the yolk-and-flour mixture first, then return everything to the pan.
- QuantitiesA pint is 2 cups of milk. "Sugar to taste" is left open; something in the range of 1/4 to 1/2 cup would suit a dessert sauce of this size. The tablespoonful beaten into the whites is called for separately, on top of whatever sweetens the custard.
- Vanilla beanThe original's "been" is a typesetting slip. Split one bean lengthwise, scrape the seeds into the milk along with the pod, infuse off the heat for ten minutes, then fish out the pod. Two teaspoons of extract stirred in at the end is the substitute, added after cooking so the aroma is not driven off.
- Cook the flour outTwo tablespoons of flour in a pint is a light thickening, but raw flour tastes of paste. Keep the sauce moving over low heat for a good three or four minutes after it thickens, which is longer than a plain crème anglaise would tolerate.
- The whitesThey are folded into hot sauce off the heat and are not properly cooked. Use pasteurized whites if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young, or immune-compromised.
- Serve at onceThe meringue starts to weep and the sauce settles back toward a flat custard fairly quickly. Fold and send it out; there is no holding this version.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 cups before the whites go in, closer to a quart after. Enough for six to eight servings over pudding, poached fruit, or a steamed sponge.
This is the foamy, flour-braced cousin of crème anglaise, the sauce French kitchens called sauce vanille. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's kitchen into print in 1896, was compiling for a readership that included both hotel cooks and ambitious households, and the flour is the tell: a pure yolk custard is a nervous thing in the hands of an unfamiliar cook, while a spoonful or two of flour makes it far harder to break. Vanilla beans in 1896 were an expensive import, largely from Mexico, Réunion, and the young plantations of Madagascar, and this recipe calls for a whole bean in a pint of milk. Sauces of this kind were served with the steamed and boiled puddings of the period.