Hard Sauce
Four tablespoonfuls of butter, one cupful of sugar, scald the bowl and spoon. Cream the butter and add the sugar, a little at a time, working it in until it is light and smooth. Then add the white of the egg beaten dry. Beat it into butter and sugar until white. Add flavoring, beat in well. Add brandy, lemon or nutmeg for flavoring. Pile lightly in a dish and serve.
This is the egg-white version of hard sauce, and the egg white is the problem: nothing in the method ever heats it. The rest of the instructions are sound period technique, but the sauce as written is an uncooked-egg preparation served straight from the bowl.
- Raw egg white, no heat stepThe white is beaten dry and folded into cold butter and sugar, then piled in a dish and served. At no point does the mixture reach a temperature that would kill Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside intact shell eggs. Unlike a raw egg in a cake batter or a custard base, there is no later cooking to fall back on.
- Sugar and brandy do not sterilise itA cup of sugar in this volume of butter does not lower water activity enough to be preservative, and a spoonful or two of brandy for flavour is far below any concentration that would inactivate bacteria. The scalded bowl and spoon clean the utensils, not the egg.
- Who eats itHard sauce is served on plum pudding and steamed puddings, which in practice means it goes to whoever is at the table, including children, pregnant women and the elderly, the groups least able to tolerate a salmonellosis infection. If you want hard sauce, use a current recipe.
- Scald the bowl and spoonMost likely for a practical reason as much as hygiene: rinsing with hot water warms the vessel so cold butter creams without seizing into lumps. Nineteenth-century kitchens were cold, and butter came out of a larder, not a temperature-controlled refrigerator.
- "Beaten dry"This means whipped to stiff peaks, at the point where the foam looks matte and grainy rather than glossy. Modern instructions would call it stiff, one stage short of the broken, weeping mass that follows.
- Butter measured in spoonfulsFour tablespoonfuls of butter is 2 oz, half a modern stick, against a full cup of sugar. That ratio is far sweeter than most present-day hard sauces, which run closer to equal weights, and it is one reason the sauce sets hard rather than staying creamy.
- Flavouring quantitiesThe original gives none for the brandy, lemon or nutmeg. Any liquid needs to go in a little at a time: too much at once will split the emulsion and the sauce curdles.
Hard sauce is generally said to take its name from its texture rather than its ingredients: creamed butter and sugar worked until firm, piled onto a hot pudding so that it melts at the table. In Britain the same thing is brandy butter, the traditional accompaniment to Christmas plum pudding, and American cookbooks of the late nineteenth century carried it alongside the boiled and steamed puddings that filled their dessert chapters. The egg white here is a refinement found in that era's household manuals, meant to lighten the sauce and whiten it so it could be piled up decoratively rather than laid on in a slab; the same trick appears in period boiled icings and in the uncooked "foamy" sauces of the same books. It belongs to a moment when raw egg white was a standard aerating agent in the kitchen, used freely in sauces, drinks and frostings, before commercial egg production and the recognition of egg-associated Salmonella changed how such recipes are read.