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Moonshine
This dessert combines a pretty appearance with palatable flavor, and is a convenient substitute for ice-cream. Beat the whites of six eggs in a broad plate to a very stiff froth, then add gradually six table-spoons powdered sugar (to make it thicker use more sugar up to a pint), beating for not less than thirty minutes, and then beat in about one heaping table-spoon of preserved peaches cut in tiny bits (or some use one cup jelly), and set on ice until thoroughly chilled. In serving, pour in each saucer some rich cream sweetened and flavored with vanilla, and on the cream place a liberal portion of the moonshine. This quantity is enough for seven or eight persons. Mrs. H. C. Meredith, Cambridge City, Ind.
Moonshine is a raw meringue: six egg whites whipped with sugar, folded with fruit, chilled and served over cream. Nothing in it is ever heated, which is the problem.
- The whites are never cookedUnlike a baked meringue, a boiled icing or a cooked custard, this mixture goes from the plate to the ice to the table without reaching any temperature at all. Raw shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella that thirty minutes of beating does nothing to reduce, and the dessert then sits chilled for a long stretch, sweetened and open to the air.
- The cream compounds itThe serving cream is also raw and sweetened, and the whole assembly is meant to stand on ice until thoroughly cold. If you want a chilled meringue dessert, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked Italian meringue.
- "Broad plate" and thirty minutesNineteenth-century cooks whipped whites on a flat platter with a flat wire whisk or a knife blade, which gave a wide, shallow surface and a very dry, stiff foam. The half-hour of beating is not exaggeration for hand work; the same stiffness comes in a few minutes in a stand mixer.
- Powdered sugar, and "up to a pint"Powdered sugar here is roughly what we would call confectioners' sugar, though period versions were less finely milled and generally not cut with cornstarch. "Up to a pint" is a volume measure of sugar -- perhaps around 8 oz by weight if reckoned as modern confectioners' sugar, and more if the coarser period article is meant -- and marks the upper limit at which the foam turns into something closer to a stiff uncooked frosting.
- Preserved peaches and jellyPreserved peaches meant put-up fruit in heavy syrup, chopped small as the recipe directs; the jelly alternative is unspecified, and would have been whatever firm jelly was on the shelf. Either adds colour and a little acidity against a very sweet, very bland foam.
- YieldThe original claims seven or eight servings from six whites, which tells you how much air is in it. That is a small saucer of foam over a pool of cream, not a bowl of mousse.
"Moonshine" as a dessert name is often said to describe the pale, cloudy, faintly luminous look of a sweetened egg-white foam heaped in a saucer of cream, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. Recipes of this shape run through the second half of the nineteenth century under several names — snow, whip, sponge — and they exist for a plain reason stated outright in the first line: they are "a convenient substitute for ice-cream" in kitchens without an ice-cream freezer, or without the labor and rock salt to run one. Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) collected such contributions by name and town, and Mrs. Meredith's entry from Cambridge City, Indiana, is typical of the book's method: a signed household formula, assuming a cook with time, arms, and a jar of last summer's peaches on the cellar shelf.