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Whipped Cream (One pint cream whipped very)
One pint cream whipped very stiff, sugar and vanilla to taste. Whites of three eggs beaten to a froth, one tablespoonful brandy.
This is a raw-egg-white foam folded into sweetened whipped cream, served without any cooking step. The dairy is fine; the eggs are the problem.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites go in beaten to a froth and the finished cream is never brought to any temperature at all. Salmonella in shell eggs is a surface and occasionally an internal contaminant, and nothing in this method reaches the roughly 160F needed to inactivate it. A dessert that sits at room temperature on a sideboard makes that worse, not better.
- The brandy does nothingOne tablespoon of spirit in a pint of cream plus three whites works out to roughly one percent alcohol by volume in the finished dish, and less once the mixture is aerated. That is far below any concentration that affects bacteria; the brandy is there for flavour only.
- If you want this dessertUse a current recipe built on pasteurised egg whites or meringue powder, or one that omits the whites entirely. Do not adapt the version above.
- What the whites were forBeaten whites were one common way to lighten and extend whipped cream, which was tiring to work up by hand. The whites add volume and a drier, more meringue-like body than cream alone.
- Reading the quantitiesIf this is an American collection, a pint of cream is 16 fluid ounces rather than the imperial 20. "Sugar and vanilla to taste" is left entirely to the cook; the recipe specifies neither the form of the sugar nor whether the vanilla is extract, bean, or vanilla-scented sugar.
Cream whipped stiff and lightened with beaten whites belongs to a family of dishes that ran from the seventeenth-century English "snow" through the nineteenth-century crème fouettée of French pastry manuals, and it shows up in American household books as a component rather than a dessert in its own right — piled on charlottes and trifles, spooned over stewed fruit, or served in glasses with a wafer. Its placement in a plain breakfast-dessert-supper collection, with no yield and no serving suggestion, suggests — though this is inference — that the compiler assumed every reader already knew where whipped cream went. The brandy may be characteristic of the period too.