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German Sauce
M. D. Harris.
The whites of two eggs, the juice of one lemon, sugar enough to beat up to a proper consistency for serving.
This is an uncooked foam sauce of the kind Victorian cooks whipped up beside a steamed pudding. The method is simple, but the result is a bowl of raw egg white served cold, and that is where it fails a modern kitchen.
- Why it cannot be made as writtenThe whites are never heated at any stage, and the sauce is served immediately. Raw egg white carries a real Salmonella risk, and unlike a batter or a custard there is no later cooking step to bring it to a safe temperature.
- Lemon juice is not a safeguardThe acid in one lemon does not sterilise egg white; it is there to flavour the foam and help stabilise it. If you want a foam sauce for a pudding, use a current recipe that heats the eggs.
- Sugar is unmeasured"Sugar enough to beat up to a proper consistency" gives no quantity at all. Comparable foam sauces often take something on the order of a cup of powdered sugar to two whites, but the original leaves it genuinely open.
- No yield givenThe recipe states no quantity of sauce or number of servings. A beaten egg-white foam of this kind also loses volume on standing.
- Not sauce allemandeDespite the name, this has nothing to do with the classic French sauce allemande, a velouté enriched with egg yolk and cream.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named householders — M. D. Harris here is one such credit — and sold for the benefit of a charitable home, a fundraising formula that produced a great many American community cookbooks in the decades after the Civil War. Sweet foam sauces like this one were a staple accompaniment to boiled and steamed puddings, and the "German" label is often said, though the derivation is uncertain, to come from the Schaumsauce of German-speaking kitchens, a whipped sauce of eggs, sugar and wine or lemon; German immigrant cookery was a strong presence in the Midwest, and dishes picked up the adjective loosely. Its brevity is typical of the genre: the recipe specifies no amounts, no temperatures, and nothing about the risks of raw eggs.