Raspberry Whip
1½ cups red raspberries. 1 cup powdered sugar.
White 1 egg.
PROCESS: Mix sugar with berries and turn into bowl in which white of egg is slightly beaten, then mash berries and sugar and mix thoroughly with egg. Beat with a wire whip until mixture is stiff to stand. Pile lightly on a chilled serving dish and surround with macaroons. Serve with 1 egg.
A raw-egg fruit foam of the sort that filled summer dessert chapters before refrigeration and food-safety testing changed the calculation. The technique is sound; the ingredient is the problem.
- Why this one fails todayThe egg white is never heated at any stage — it is beaten raw with sugar and fruit and served cold. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the white as well as the yolk, and an uncooked whip holds it at room temperature while being piled and garnished. If you want a raspberry whip, use a current recipe built on pasteurized egg white or a cooked meringue.
- Quantities as printedThe berry measure is one and a half cups. One cup of powdered sugar to that much fruit is very sweet by modern taste.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered" means finely ground white sugar, closer to today's superfine or caster sugar than to the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now.
- Wire whipA hand-held wire whisk was the tool assumed here, and the mixture is meant to be beaten until it holds a peak without slumping — several minutes of steady work. The sugar weighs the foam down, and the instruction asks for a mixture "stiff to stand."
- MacaroonsThe surrounding macaroons are the almond-and-egg-white discs of the era, crisp and plain, not French sandwich macarons. Any dry almond biscuit would fill the same role as the edible border.
- YieldNo serving count is given. A cup and a half of berries whipped to full volume fills a medium bowl; any serving figure is a guess.
Fruit whips belong to the brief late-Victorian and Edwardian moment when the wire whisk, cheap refined sugar and cheap summer berries met in the same kitchen. A whip is the simplest of the egg-white desserts — no gelatine, no cooking, no ice — and cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s printed one for nearly every fruit in season: prune, apricot, strawberry, raspberry. Raspberries were a short-season market fruit, and a whip stretched a modest amount of them into a dish that looked generous. The macaroon border is the period's standard finish for a soft dessert, giving something crisp to eat against the foam, and the same garnish turns up around charlottes and Bavarian creams in the same books.