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Whipped Cream (To one pint of sweet cream add)
To one pint of sweet cream, add the whites of three eggs beaten to a stiff froth, five tablespoonfuls of sweet wine, three of pulverized sugar, one teaspoonful of lemon extract. Mix all together and whip until it stands solid; remove the froth as it rises with a spoon and put it on an inverted sieve with a dish under it to catch that which may drain through, and whip that which drains through again. Keep on ice or in a very cool place.
This is a raw-egg preparation that is whipped, drained and then held cold until served — the whites are never heated at any point. That is the reason it cannot be recommended today, and the notes below explain the problem and the period details behind the method.
- The raw whites are the problemThree egg whites are folded into cream and eaten uncooked. Salmonella in shell eggs is a surface and interior risk that only heat or pasteurisation removes, and nothing in this method reaches a lethal temperature. Modern practice for uncooked egg-white foams calls for a pasteurised product; a current recipe should be used instead of this one.
- Holding time makes it worseThe instruction to keep the mixture on ice or in a very cool place reflects period cold storage, which was generally warmer and less steady than modern refrigeration. A sweetened dairy-and-egg foam held at such temperatures is a favourable growth medium, and the skimming and draining stage adds further handling before the mixture is chilled.
- "Sweet cream" and "sweet wine"Sweet cream means fresh cream as opposed to soured cream, not sweetened cream. Sweet wine means a sweet dessert or fortified wine of the kind then kept for the purpose; the recipe does not name one. The five tablespoons of wine are for flavour and contribute nothing that would make the eggs safe.
- The inverted sieveBefore mechanical mixers, cream was whipped by hand with a whisk or churn and the stiff froth skimmed off as it formed. The sieve drains the thin liquid back so it can be re-whipped, a sound technique for hand-whipping, but it extends the time the mixture spends out of the cold.
- Pulverized sugarPulverized sugar is what would now be sold as icing or confectioners' sugar, ground fine so it dissolves in a cold foam without grittiness. Period versions were not always cut with cornstarch.
- ScaleA pint of cream plus whites and wine yields a generous quantity of froth, more than one dish would need. This reads as a component to be spooned over fruit, cake or jelly rather than a dessert in itself.
Whipped cream stiffened with egg white belongs to the long line of English and American syllabubs and "snow creams", in which cream, wine, sugar and citrus were beaten to a froth and skimmed off the top — the recipe's inverted sieve is a direct survival of that technique, described in cookery books well before the nineteenth century. Egg white was added because hand-whipped cream, before high-butterfat standardisation and reliable refrigeration, collapsed quickly; albumen gave the foam more body and helped it hold through an evening at table. The lemon extract and dessert wine mark it as company food rather than everyday cooking.