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Butterless Sauce
Place one-half a gill of milk in a pan in boiling water; when scalding put in half a pint of powdered sugar mixed with the yolks of two eggs, stir until thick as boiled custard, take off; when cool add flavoring. Just before serving mix the well-beaten whites lightly with the sauce.
A soft custard sauce for steamed and baked puddings, lightened with beaten whites at the last moment. The whole thing hangs on keeping the yolk mixture below a simmer.
- The measuresA gill is a quarter of a pint, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons of milk. Half a pint of sugar is a volume measure, roughly 1 cup of powdered sugar, about 4 oz by weight.
- "Powdered sugar" in 1880"Powdered sugar" in the period -- Period powdered sugar usually meant granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. Modern confectioners' sugar works and will thicken the sauce slightly more; superfine sugar is closer to the original.
- The hinge: indirect heat"In a pan in boiling water" is a double boiler, and it is not optional with only 4 tablespoons of milk to 2 yolks and a cup of sugar. Direct heat will scramble the yolks in seconds; keep the mixture at 170-175F and pull it the moment it coats a spoon.
- It is a very sweet sauceThe sugar-to-liquid ratio is high, which is what gives the sauce its body in the absence of butter. It suits being spooned thinly over a plain pudding rather than eaten by the dish.
- FlavoringThe book leaves this open; vanilla, lemon, nutmeg, or a spoonful of sherry or brandy would all be plausible period choices. Add it off the heat and cool, as the original says, so alcohol and volatile extracts are not driven off.
- The whitesFold them in within a few minutes of serving; the foam begins collapsing into the syrupy base almost at once. They are not cooked, so if the sauce is for anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized-in-shell eggs or pasteurized whites.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 cups once the whites are folded in, enough for six modest servings of pudding. It does not reheat: the foam goes and the custard tightens.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of late nineteenth-century American compilations built from contributed household receipts, and its sauce chapter is a fair survey of what a pudding got dressed with before whipped cream was a year-round convenience. Many pudding sauces of the era leaned on butter -- hard sauce, foaming sauce, drawn butter sweetened -- so a recipe advertised as "butterless" is telling the cook something useful about cost and season. Butter was dear, variable in quality, and in much of the South in summer both scarce and inclined to turn, while eggs and a little milk were nearly always to hand. The technique is a thin cr eme anglaise stretched with sugar and lifted with meringue, a relative of the German Weinschaum and the sabayon of French and Italian cooking; the American version simply swaps wine for milk and finishes with the whites the yolks left over. Recipes of this shape appear under several names in the period -- foam sauce, snow sauce, cream sauce for puddings -- and the fact that this one is defined by what it omits says more about the kitchen it came from than any of them.