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Apricot Sauce
Beat powdered sugar, apricot-juice, and pieces of fruit together. Whip white of an egg very light, and add to beaten fruit and sugar, or add fruit gradually to unbeaten egg white, and beat some minutes. Sauce made in second way will stand longer. Different fruits may be used.
A thrift sauce for pudding, built from the syrup and broken fruit left in a jar of preserved apricots. It is also an uncooked raw-egg-white foam, which is where it runs into trouble.
- Why it fails nowThe egg white is never heated at any stage, and the sauce is designed to stand for a while before serving. Raw shell eggs carry a Salmonella risk that cannot be managed by beating or by the sugar and fruit acid, and a sauce held at room temperature only widens the window. Use a current recipe if you want a fruit foam sauce.
- "Powdered sugar"In books of this period the term usually means finely ground granulated sugar — closer to today's caster or superfine sugar — not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name in the United States now.
- Apricot-juiceMost likely the syrup from home-canned or preserved apricots rather than modern bottled apricot nectar, though the recipe does not say so.
- No quantities at allThe recipe gives none: not the amount of fruit, not the sugar, not how many whites. It assumes a cook who will judge by eye.
- The two methodsAdding fruit gradually to unbeaten white and beating for several minutes builds a finer, more stable foam than folding fruit into an already-stiff white, which is why the author says it "will stand longer." That observation is sound meringue practice; it does not make the sauce safe to hold.
- "Different fruits may be used"The recipe leaves the choice open; any fruit with enough sugar and acid to hold flavour against a bland foam would suit.
Uncooked whipped-egg fruit sauces of this kind were standard nineteenth-century pudding accompaniments, and they belong to a moment when a beaten egg white was the cheapest way to make a small amount of fruit look like a great deal of dessert. Their appearance in a book devoted to left-overs is the point: a jar of apricots reduced to syrup and a few softened halves was not worth serving as fruit, but whipped up with sugar it dressed a plain cornstarch mould or a slice of stale cake. Cookbooks of the era treated raw egg white as a neutral, almost mechanical ingredient — a source of volume rather than something with a food-safety dimension — and recipes like this one circulated freely in household manuals well into the twentieth century, before the link between shell eggs and salmonellosis was understood.