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Pudding Sauce (Simple pudding sauce is made)
A simple pudding sauce is made by beating to a cream two cupfuls of sugar, one-half cupful of butter. Then add the beaten yolk of an egg, with any flavoring desired. Lastly, add the white of the egg beaten to a stiff froth, and stir in lightly.
This is a creamed uncooked sauce — sugar, butter and raw egg, served as-is. The egg is never heated at any point, which is what puts it out of reach today.
- Raw egg, no heat stepThe yolk and the beaten white both go in raw and stay raw; nothing in the method brings the mixture anywhere near the 160F at which egg proteins are pasteurized. Shell eggs carry a real risk of Salmonella Enteritidis, which is why uncooked egg-based sauces are now generally made with pasteurized egg instead.
- Sugar and butter are not preservatives hereSome old hard sauces relied on a heavy dose of brandy or sherry, which offers at least some antimicrobial effect. This one specifies only "any flavoring desired," so there is nothing in the formula that would inhibit bacterial growth.
- Service conditions make it worseService conditions -- If a sauce like this is spooned onto hot pudding and left standing, warming raw egg to serving temperature without cooking it is the least favorable case, not a mitigation.
- The beaten white cannot be salvaged by foldingThe beaten white -- The stiff froth is what gives the sauce its lightness, and it depends on the white being beaten rather than cooked. If you want to approximate it, use pasteurized egg, or use a current cooked custard sauce or a stirred hard sauce recipe instead.
"Pudding sauce" in American cookbooks of this era covers a family of sweet dressings for steamed and boiled puddings, ranging from thin cornstarch-thickened sauces to the stiff creamed-butter kind known as hard sauce. The creamed sugar-and-butter version is generally traced to English practice, where brandy butter of the same construction still accompanies Christmas pudding; lightening it with a whipped egg white produced what period books sometimes call a foam or frothy sauce. Commercial egg distribution and the recognition of Salmonella Enteritidis in intact shell eggs, both later developments, are what moved recipes like this one out of the repertoire.