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Angels' Food
Beat the whites of six eggs to a froth, a tablespoonful of sugar to each white (powdered), into which beat a little red jelly to give it color. Whip a pint of cream, seasoned and sweetened to taste. Pour the preparation over it and serve with cake. -Mrs. Gov. Ross, Austin, Texas.
The dish is a raw-egg-white foam folded through whipped cream, and that is the whole problem: nothing in it is ever heated. The notes below explain the failure points rather than offering a rebuilt version.
- Raw whites, never cookedSix egg whites are beaten, tinted and served straight from the bowl. Salmonella can be present in whites as well as yolks, and a cold dessert gives it nothing but time. Uncooked-egg foams of this kind are exactly the preparation that current guidance advises against for anyone, and specifically for children, pregnant women, the elderly and the immunocompromised. A modern recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue should be used instead.
- No sugar syrup, no safety marginUnlike an Italian meringue, where hot syrup is poured into the whites, here the powdered sugar is simply beaten in cold. There is no step in the method that could bring the egg anywhere near a safe temperature.
- Cream of the periodThe pint of cream would likely have been raw or lightly handled dairy from a local supply. Whipping does nothing to it microbiologically, so the finished bowl combines two uncooked animal products, and it would have been served cold at best rather than held at a safe temperature.
- "A little red jelly"Red currant jelly is the usual reading, used purely as a pink dye and a little extra sweetness. Many household colourings of the period were dubious; jelly at least was food, which is more than can be said for some tinted desserts of the era.
- UnitsA pint of cream is two cups; whipped, it roughly doubles. The sugar is a tablespoon per white, so six tablespoons in all, powdered rather than granulated.
- Why it is filed under Fancy DishesWhat it actually is -- This is a sauce or accompaniment, not a standing dessert. "Serve with cake" means it was spooned over plain sponge or pound cake; the method calls for no mould, no baking and no setting time.
Cookbooks of this generation drew authority from names, and this one is contributed by "Mrs. Gov. Ross of Austin, Texas" — generally identified as the wife of Lawrence Sullivan Ross, Confederate general, Texas Ranger and governor of Texas from 1887 to 1891. Subscription and community cookbooks routinely solicited receipts from governors' and senators' wives, and the contributor's title did as much work as the instructions. The name "angels' food" attached itself in the late nineteenth century to anything white, airy and eggy: the familiar cake, various whipped-cream and meringue puddings, and boiled-icing confections all claimed it; a darker "devil's food" appears alongside it in cookbooks somewhat later. The dish itself belongs to a moment when a dessert could be nothing more than beaten whites and cream, made at the last minute and eaten at once — which is precisely why it does not survive translation to a modern kitchen.