Foaming Sauce
Beat whites of three eggs to a stiff froth; melt tea-cup of sugar in a little water, let it boil, stir in one glass wine, and then the whites of the three eggs; serve at once. -Mrs. Carrie Glazier, Chicago, Ill.
A wine-and-egg-white foam in the Italian meringue family, meant for hot steamed and boiled puddings. Everything depends on the syrup being hot enough when it meets the whites.
- The hinge: syrup temperatureThe recipe says only to boil the sugar and water. A syrup taken further, toward the soft-ball stage of roughly 238-240F, will hold a firmer foam; a barely-boiled syrup tends to stay thin and weep, and one cooked well past that point risks setting hard. The book gives no temperature, so this is interpretation rather than instruction.
- Order of operationsAdding the wine to the boiling syrup drops its temperature sharply. It is more reliable to beat the hot syrup into the stiff whites in a slow stream, then beat in the wine at the end.
- A tea-cup of sugarPeriod tea-cup measures vary; the usual reckoning is somewhere between a scant 3/4 cup and a full cup of granulated sugar, with enough water -- roughly 1/4 cup -- to wet it. The measure is genuinely approximate.
- A glass of wineA wineglass in nineteenth-century American cookbooks is about 2 fluid ounces, a scant 1/4 cup. Sherry, madeira or a sweet marsala suit the sauce better than table wine.
- Egg whitesThree large whites, at room temperature and beaten to firm peaks before the syrup goes in. Hot syrup alone does not reliably bring the whites to a safe temperature, however far it is cooked; pasteurized carton whites remove the question entirely.
- Serve at onceThe instruction is literal. The foam begins to separate soon after it is made, and reheating collapses it. Beat it while the pudding is being turned out.
- YieldAbout three cups of loose foam, enough for six to eight servings spooned over plum pudding, cottage pudding or a steamed fruit pudding.
Foaming, or "frothy," sauces were the lighter alternative to hard sauce on the nineteenth-century pudding table: hard sauce was butter and sugar creamed cold, while this one is sugar syrup and wine whipped into egg whites and eaten warm. The technique is the same one that produces Italian meringue. Its presence in The Dixie Cook Book is a reminder that the volume, for all its Southern branding, drew on contributions from well beyond the South -- this one credited to a Mrs. Carrie Glazier of Chicago. Wine sauces of this kind also belong to a period when a bottle of sherry or madeira was often kept in the kitchen for flavoring puddings, jellies and mince pies.