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Moonshine
Take a glass of tart jelly and beat up until easy to work with. Beat the whites of six eggs to a stiff froth; add six level tablespoonfuls of sugar; flavor to taste; add the jelly and beat until stiff enough to stand in a pretty erect way on a flat dish. Make a sauce of one and a half teacupfuls of sweet cream and the whites of two eggs. Beat the whites to a stiff froth, adding sugar and flavoring to taste; add the cream and beat briskly until the whole mixture is brought to a stiff froth. Stir a little lemon or vanilla into the eggs before mixing with the cream. Serve the moonshine in pretty dishes and pile the sauce on top. If made of some rich colored jelly, moonshine is a very ornamental dish. -Mrs. Fudge Halley.
This is a raw-egg-white dessert with no cooking step anywhere in it, which is why it cannot be recommended as written. The notes below explain the problem and decode the period language.
- Eight raw egg whites, never heatedSix whites go into the whip and two into the sauce, and nothing in the method brings any of them above room temperature. Salmonella can be present in the white as well as the yolk, and beating, sugaring and chilling do nothing to it. Anyone cooking a whipped dessert of this kind today should work from a current recipe built around a cooked or pasteurized base.
- Why beating gives no protectionStiffness is only protein structure from mechanical agitation; it is not a kill step, and the acid in the jelly is nowhere near strong enough to substitute for heat.
- It stands at room temperatureIt has no chilling step -- The dish is piled high and served as an ornament, and nothing in the method chills it, so an uncooked egg-and-cream mixture may stand at room temperature while it is served. The cream sauce compounds that.
- "A glass of tart jelly"A jelly glass of the period held roughly a cup, though the measure was never standardized and the intended amount here is genuinely open. The jelly is fruit jelly — currant, crabapple, quince — beaten soft, not gelatin dessert.
- TeacupfulPeriod American books vary, but a teacupful is often reckoned at rather less than a full eight-ounce cup, commonly around six fluid ounces, which would put the sauce at roughly nine fluid ounces of cream — a generous cup rather than a cup and a half.
- "Sweet cream"This means fresh unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour cream that was a routine byproduct of a household dairy. It is not a sweetened product.
"Moonshine" here has nothing to do with illicit whiskey; it is one of a family of pale, cold, foamed desserts — snow pudding, apple snow, whipped syllabub, jelly whip — that filled the sweet course in American households from the mid-nineteenth century onward, the name traditionally explained by their white, faintly luminous look. Such dishes depended entirely on hand-beaten egg white, and it is often suggested that their popularity was helped along by the spread of the wire whisk and the rotary egg beater. The instruction to use "some rich colored jelly" points to the appeal of the dish: it is decorative, cheap, and made from what a household with a fruit crop already had on the shelf. The attribution to a named contributor is typical of community compilations, which were often assembled from recipes solicited from readers, church members or club women.