Home › Sauce › A Good Sauce for Puddings
A Good Sauce for Puddings
Ingredients: Half a cupful of butter, one cupful of sugar, one egg, white beaten to a stiff froth, and the yolk to a cream, two tablespoonfuls of wine and half a wine glass of boiling water. Beat the butter and sugar and yolk to a cream. Just before sending to the table, add the white of the egg beaten to a froth, and stir in the boiling water, beating it to a foam; it may be flavored with brandy or wine, lemon or vanilla.
This is a foaming pudding sauce of the hard-sauce family, and the egg in it is never cooked. The points below explain the archaic measures and why the method cannot be recommended as printed.
- The egg is rawBoth yolk and white go in uncooked. Half a wine glass of boiling water poured into a cold cup of butter and sugar drops well below any pasteurising temperature almost instantly, and the sauce is served at once rather than held over heat. There is a real Salmonella risk, particularly for children, pregnant women, the elderly and anyone immune-compromised. Use a current recipe for a cooked or pasteurised-egg foam sauce instead.
- The wine and brandy do not helpTwo tablespoonfuls of wine in this quantity of sauce is nowhere near enough alcohol, and nowhere near enough contact time, to make a raw egg safe.
- A wine glassIn cookbooks of this period a wine glass is about 2 fluid ounces, so half a wine glass is roughly 2 tablespoons. It is a small amount of liquid, meant only to loosen and foam the creamed butter.
- SugarThe recipe does not specify a grade. Fine granulated or powdered sugar is what this method needs, since coarse sugar will not dissolve in a cold creamed mixture and the sauce will be gritty.
- "Just before sending to the table"The instruction is not stylistic. A butter-and-egg-white foam collapses and weeps within a few minutes, which is why the white and the hot water are held back until the pudding is going out.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half to two cups of sauce.
Sauces of this kind sit between two English traditions: hard sauce, which is simply butter creamed with sugar and spirits and served cold in a firm mound, and the warm foaming sauces beaten up with egg and hot liquid at the last moment. In late-Victorian and turn-of-the-century American household cookery, a boiled or steamed pudding was considered incomplete without one. The flexible flavouring list here, brandy or wine, lemon or vanilla, let the cook suit whatever the store cupboard held and whether the pudding was a plain one or a holiday one. The frank use of uncooked egg is entirely typical of the period, when raw eggs also went into eggnogs, invalid drinks and beaten-egg tonics without comment.