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Pudding Sauce (VI)
Mrs. Andrews.
One cup of sugar, one-half cup of butter, yolks of three eggs; one teaspoon of corn starch or arrowroot; stir the whole until very light; add sufficient boiling water to make the consistency of thick cream ; wine or brandy to suit the taste.
This is one of a numbered run of pudding sauces, and it is the raw-yolk kind: the eggs are creamed with sugar and butter and then merely slackened with boiling water, with no cooking step at all.
- The eggs are never cookedA cup of sugar, half a cup of butter and three yolks make a cold, dense mass that will pull down the temperature of poured-in boiling water. Nothing in this method holds the yolks anywhere near the 160F usually cited for dealing with Salmonella, and there is no instruction to hold the sauce over heat at any point.
- No thermometer, no double boiler, no timingThe recipe gives no vessel, no heat source and no test for doneness beyond "the consistency of thick cream" — thickness that comes from the cornstarch and the emulsion, not from cooked egg. There is no way to make it as printed and know the yolks are safe. Use a current recipe for a cooked custard or foamy sauce instead.
- The brandy is not a safeguardAlcohol is sometimes assumed to make such a mixture safe. The proportion here is "to suit the taste," which is far too little alcohol, far too diluted, to do anything to bacteria in the yolks.
- Corn starch or arrowrootThe recipe offers the two as alternatives, as many of this period do. Arrowroot sets clearer and slightly softer; either needs to be cooked to lose its raw taste, which is another thing this method never does.
- ScaleA cup of sugar to three yolks and half a cup of butter is a rich sauce for a family-sized pudding; the amount of boiling water, and so the final yield, is left to the cook.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women — hence "Mrs. Andrews" — and sold for charity, which is why the same dish appears half a dozen times over with different signatures and no attempt to reconcile them. Pudding sauces were a fixed part of the Victorian dinner: a boiled or baked pudding arrived plain and was made respectable by a sweet sauce, ranging from cold creamed "hard sauce" through this sort of thinned egg-and-butter mixture to properly cooked custards. The wine-or-brandy finish descends from the older English tradition of sack and brandy sauces for plum pudding, and in an American community cookbook of this date it also signals a household with a bottle in the sideboard for cooking, at a time when temperance sentiment was making that a quietly contested point.