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Pudding Sauce (II)
Mrs. Dunham.
One-half cup of butter, one cup of sugar, two eggs, well beaten, and pour on one cup of boiling water; flavour with nutmeg or other flavour.
This is the sweet pouring sauce that went over boiled and steamed puddings in nineteenth-century American households. As written it is a raw-egg sauce, and that is the problem.
- The eggs are never cookedTwo beaten eggs are combined with butter and sugar, and a single cup of boiling water is poured over the top. A cup of boiling water poured over that much butter, sugar and egg is unlikely to bring the mixture to a temperature that reliably pasteurises egg, and nothing in the instruction returns it to the heat.
- Why that matters hereSalmonella in shell eggs is a real risk in an uncooked sauce that is then held warm on the table -- the worst possible holding temperature. A cooked custard-style pudding sauce, taken to a measured temperature over hot water, is what a current recipe will tell you to do; use one of those instead.
- The original assumed a cook who knew betterThe original as printed -- Some period pudding sauces of this type were finished over hot water until they thickened, but whether that was intended here cannot be known: Mrs. Dunham's version gives no such step, no vessel and no visual cue, so there is nothing to follow safely.
- Butter measured by the cupHalf a cup of butter is 4 oz, one stick. Nineteenth-century American recipe books moved from weights to cup measures over this period, which is why butter turns up measured by volume rather than by the pound.
- FlavouringNutmeg is the one flavouring named; other period flavourings for sweet pudding sauces included rosewater, lemon peel, brandy or sherry. Vanilla extract was available but comparatively expensive.
- YieldThe quantities make somewhere over two cups of thin sauce.
Pudding sauce was not an optional flourish in the nineteenth-century kitchen but the thing that made a boiled pudding edible: suet and flour puddings, steamed in a cloth or mould for two or three hours, came to the table dense and only lightly sweetened, and the sauce carried the sugar, the butter and the flavouring. Cookbooks of the period often print several of them in a row, numbered rather than named -- hard sauce creamed with sugar, a cornstarch-thickened sweet sauce, a wine sauce, and foaming sauces like this one built on beaten egg. The Home Cook Book -- a title that circulated in both Chicago and Toronto editions -- is generally said to have been compiled from contributions by named local women, which is why this appears as Mrs. Dunham's rather than as a house recipe, and it shows the characteristic weakness of that method: the ingredients are recorded, but the step at the stove goes unmentioned.