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Pudding Sauce (Two cupfuls of powdered sugar)
Two cupfuls of powdered sugar, one cupful of butter beaten to a very light cream, one egg yolk and white beaten separately, one-half cup boiling water, two tablespoonfuls French brandy, or juice of one lemon.
This is a creamed brandy or lemon sauce of the hard-sauce family, meant to be spooned cold or barely warm over a hot steamed pudding. As written it is never cooked, and that is the problem.
- Why the egg is the issueOne half cup of boiling water stirred into two cups of sugar and a cup of butter will not raise the mixture anywhere near 160F, the temperature at which egg proteins are pasteurised. The beaten yolk and white stay effectively raw, and the sauce is then held and served without further heat, which is the classic setting for Salmonella in shell eggs. Comparable sauces are also found in cooked forms, stirred over hot water or made as sabayons. Use a current recipe if you want a foamy pudding sauce.
- Powdered sugarIn nineteenth-century American usage "powdered sugar" generally meant sugar ground finer than granulated but coarser than today's confectioners' sugar, and it did not contain the cornstarch that modern confectioners' sugar usually does. The starch affects both texture and the way the sauce holds together.
- French brandyI.e. imported brandy from France as distinct from domestic spirit; the specification appears to be about quality rather than a distinct product. Two tablespoons in a sauce of this size is a flavouring, not a preservative, and does nothing to make the raw egg safe.
- "Beaten to a very light cream"The butter is beaten until pale and aerated before the other ingredients go in. The structure of the sauce depends on that aeration plus the separately beaten white.
Sauces like this belong to the long tradition of rich cold sauces served against hot boiled and steamed puddings, the plainest of which is the creamed butter-and-sugar mixture English cooks called hard sauce and often flavoured with brandy. The difference here is the egg: beating the yolk and white in separately, and slackening the whole with boiling water, turns a stiff hard sauce into a light foaming one, closer in effect to a sabayon.