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English Walnut Creams
Beat the white of one egg very stiff, then add one tablespoonful of cold water and nearly one pound of confectionery sugar or enough to mix well, then take a small piece at a time and make it into a little ball, flatten it on both sides; place half an English walnut meat, and they are done. No cooking is necessary and they are much better than those you buy.
This is an uncooked fondant "cream" bound with raw egg white, a standard American home-candy formula of the period. Nothing in it ever reaches a temperature that would make the egg safe, and the finished sweets were meant to sit out at room temperature for hours or days.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe egg white is the only binder and it is eaten uncooked. Salmonella can be present in and on shell eggs, and confectioners' sugar has no antimicrobial effect at these proportions. Anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised is at real risk from a sweet like this.
- No sugar cook to fall back onBoiled fondants and Italian meringues take the syrup to roughly 235-245F, which sets the candy and, in the meringue, partly cooks the whites. Here there is no cooking stage at all, so nothing in the process reduces the hazard. If you want walnut creams, use a current recipe built on a cooked sugar syrup or a fondant with no egg.
- Storage makes it worseStorage -- The recipe gives no storage direction, but an uncooked paste of this kind would be held at kitchen temperature. Any extended holding at room temperature is the condition under which contamination multiplies.
- "Confectionery sugar"Broadly what is now sold as confectioners' or powdered sugar, though the modern product is cut with a little cornstarch and the period one need not have been. Nearly one pound to a single egg white gives some sense of how stiff the paste was meant to be.
- English walnutThe term distinguishes the common Persian walnut, Juglans regia, from the American black walnut, which is stronger in flavour and much harder to shell in clean halves. The recipe wants a neat half meat pressed into each disc.
Uncooked fondant creams were an entry point to home candy-making in the late nineteenth century, when refined powdered sugar became cheap and reliable enough to buy by the pound at a grocer. Cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s carry numbers of these "no cooking is necessary" confections, flavoured with vanilla, rose or peppermint and finished with a nut, a candied cherry or a dip of chocolate. The closing boast that they are "much better than those you buy" reflects a genuine anxiety of the period about commercial candy, which was widely and often correctly suspected of being adulterated with terra alba and glucose and coloured with metallic pigments.