Home › Sauce › Strawberry Sauce
Strawberry Sauce
Ingredients: Half a cupful of butter, one cupful of sugar, the beaten white of an egg and one cupful of strawberries mashed. Rub butter and sugar to a cream; add the beaten white of the egg and the strawberries thoroughly mashed.
This is a creamed hard sauce in the older style, spread or spooned onto hot puddings. Its structure depends on an egg white that is never cooked, which is where it fails for a modern kitchen.
- The raw egg whiteThe beaten white is folded in cold and never cooked at any stage; the recipe gives no heating step and no serving instruction. Uncooked shell egg carries a Salmonella risk that is not addressed by mashing, sugar or butter. If you want a strawberry hard sauce, use a current recipe.
- Nothing here kills anythingSugar and butter are not preservatives at this ratio, and there is no heat or alcohol step; the small amount of acid from the fruit does nothing useful for safety.
- Measures, for readingThe recipe gives no cup size. If read as the now-standard 8 fl oz cup, half a cupful of butter is 4 oz, one stick.
- "Rub to a cream"Period shorthand for creaming butter and sugar by hand with the back of a spoon against the bowl until pale and smooth, before anything else is added.
- The strawberriesMashed raw fruit releases juice that thins a butter-and-sugar base and will separate on standing.
Hard sauce — butter and sugar creamed together, sometimes with brandy, sherry, vanilla or fruit — was a common accompaniment to steamed and boiled puddings in the nineteenth century, and American books of the period carry numerous variations in their sauce chapters. A strawberry version would have belonged to the short early-summer season, before berries were a year-round import. The beaten egg white lightens what would otherwise be a dense fat-and-sugar paste. Raw egg appears in many turn-of-the-century sauces, icings and "snow" puddings, which is one reason such recipes are seldom reprinted as written.