Home › Sauces › Strawberry Sauce
Strawberry Sauce
Half tea-cup of butter, one and a half tea-cups of sugar, and one pint of strawberries mashed till juicy. (Canned berries may be substituted for fresh ones). Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; then stir in the berries and the beaten white of an egg.
A creamed butter-and-sugar dessert sauce of the hard-sauce family, lightened with fruit and raw egg white. The units are period-specific, and the egg is the problem.
- The raw egg whiteThe beaten white is folded into a cold sauce that is never heated at any point. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the white as well as the yolk, and this sauce is meant to sit on a warm pudding at room temperature, which is a growth window rather than a kill step. For a fruit sauce of this type, use a current recipe.
- Why the sugar does not protect itThe sugar here is dissolved into butter and diluted further by a pint of berry juice, so the finished sauce has neither the water activity of a candy nor the acidity of a curd. Nothing in the formula inhibits bacterial growth.
- Tea-cupIn American books of this period a tea-cup is smaller than a modern measuring cup, usually reckoned at about three-quarters of a cup, though the books are inconsistent and some treat it as a full cup. Half a tea-cup of butter is roughly 6 tablespoons on the smaller reading.
- Canned berriesThe permitted substitution means the wet-packed canned fruit of the era, generally put up in syrup. Thawed frozen berries, drained of their liquid, are the nearer modern equivalent to the fruit rather than to the syrup.
- YieldAs written this makes roughly a pint and a half of sauce, a quantity intended to be spooned over a pudding rather than served alone.
Sweet creamed butter sauces run through nineteenth-century American cookery -- hard sauce is the name most often attached to them -- and they exist because the puddings they dressed were dense, plain and steamed. Butter beaten with sugar until pale gave a cold sauce that melted into a hot pudding, and cooks flavored it with whatever was to hand: brandy, rose water, lemon, or, in season, mashed fruit. The beaten egg white is the era's standard lightener, doing the work that whipped cream would later do. That The Dixie Cook Book -- published in Atlanta but compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox and drawn largely from Northern material -- allows canned berries as a substitute may hint at the growing availability of commercially canned fruit, which would let a household treat strawberries as a year-round flavoring rather than a few weeks' luxury.