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Frosted Cherries
Take ripe cherries and dip them first into the beaten white of an egg and then in finely powdered sifted loaf sugar. When done they may be laid on a sheet of white paper, placed in an inverted sieve on the back of a range or in a cool oven for the frosting to dry.
Sour cream or milk may be restored by mixing with it carbinate of magnesia, allowing one heaping teaspoonful to every quart of cream or milk, a small pinch of soda dissolved in a little hot water and added to the cream or milk is equally as good.
The technique is simple confectionery, but the coating is raw egg white that never reaches a safe temperature, and the paragraph tacked onto the end is a separate and worse piece of advice about spoiled dairy.
- Raw egg white is the problemThe white is applied uncooked and then merely dried in a cool oven or on the warm back of a range — nowhere near the 160F needed to inactivate Salmonella. Drying concentrates the coating but does not pasteurise it, and the finished cherries are eaten as they are. If you want frosted fruit, use a current recipe written around pasteurised egg white or meringue powder.
- The dairy note is not a rescueCarbonate of magnesia (magnesium carbonate) and baking soda neutralise the lactic acid in soured milk or cream, which removes the sour taste. They do nothing to the bacteria that produced it, so the only effect is to hide the single warning sign the cook had. Milk that has gone off should be discarded.
- Why the hint is here at allThe dairy paragraph has no connection to the cherries above it; it reads as a separate item that happens to share the page, of the kind that often fills out a short entry in books of this sort. Treat it as a separate item.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold as a hard cone or loaf, broken with nippers and pounded; "finely powdered sifted loaf sugar" is the period equivalent of caster or superfine sugar, not modern powdered sugar, which contains cornstarch.
- Carbonate of magnesiaSold by druggists as a mild antacid and still available as magnesium carbonate. It was a familiar pharmacy item, which is why a cookbook could assume a reader would have it to hand.
- The inverted sieveA sieve turned upside down over the fruit is a dome that keeps dust and flies off while letting air move freely — the same job a wire cooling cover does now. "A cool oven" here means barely warm, the residual heat of a range that has gone out rather than a set temperature.
Frosted or crystallised fruit belongs to the long tradition of sugar-work that ran from the confectioner's still-room into the ordinary Victorian household once refined sugar became cheap. Egg white and fine sugar were the standard coating for flowers, grapes, cherries and citrus peel, producing a glittering fruit that was meant chiefly to look well on a stand at the end of a meal; violets and rose petals were treated the same way for decorating cakes. The appended note on restoring soured milk is a reminder of the real context: before domestic refrigeration, cream turned within a day in warm weather, and books of this kind were full of ways to salvage it that a modern reader should read as history rather than instruction.