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Pudding Sauce (V)
Mrs. B. P. Hutchinson.
Two eggs well beaten, one cup pulverized sugar. When mixed pour over one cup boiling milk, and stir rapidly. Flavour as you please.
This is a one-line stirred custard sauce of the kind that once sat beside every boiled or steamed pudding. As written the eggs are never cooked, only warmed, which is the reason for the caution above.
- Why it failsTwo whole eggs plus a cup of sugar, at room temperature, absorb much of the heat from a single cup of boiling milk. The mixture lands well short of a cooking temperature and immediately begins to fall, so the eggs are not reliably held long enough at a temperature that would deal with Salmonella. A proper stirred custard is returned to the heat and cooked; this one is not.
- No cooking step at allThe instruction stops at "stir rapidly." There is no pan, no low flame, no thickening cue, and no mention of straining. When this book was compiled a raw-egg sauce was unremarkable. If you want a pouring custard for a pudding, use a current recipe.
- Pulverized sugarNineteenth-century pulverized sugar is not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. It was loaf sugar crushed fine — closest today to superfine or caster sugar.
- "Flavour as you please"The period defaults were nutmeg, lemon rind, vanilla, or a spoonful of brandy, sherry or rum. Cookbooks of this decade often left the choice open.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half of thin sauce, enough for four to six servings of pudding. It was meant to be poured, not spooned — closer to modern pouring cream than to a thick custard.
The Home Cook Book belongs to a distinctly North American genre: the charity compilation, in which the recipes of named local women were gathered and sold to fund a hospital or a home for the friendless. The Chicago edition was assembled that way, and the Toronto edition that followed carried many of the same contributions, which is why Chicago society names turn up in a Canadian book. Mrs. B. P. Hutchinson is generally identified as the wife of Benjamin P. Hutchinson, the Chicago grain trader known as "Old Hutch," though these books rarely gave more than a surname and an initial. The five or more numbered pudding sauces in a section like this one reflect how central boiled and steamed puddings were to the period's dinner: the pudding itself was plain, and the sauce — hard sauce, wine sauce, or a thin egg custard like this — did the work of making it a dessert.