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Raspberry Float
Crush a pint of very ripe red raspberries with a gill of sugar; beat the whites of four eggs to a stiff froth and add gradually a gill of powdered sugar; press the raspberries through a fine strainer to avoid the seeds, and by degrees beat in the juice with the egg and sugar until so stiff that it stands in peaks.
A raw-egg fruit whip of the sort that filled the fruit chapter of nineteenth-century household books. The method is sound as meringue technique, but the finished float is served without any cooking step, and that is where it fails today.
- The eggs are never heatedFour raw whites are beaten with fruit juice and sugar and eaten as they are. Nothing in the recipe brings them to a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, which can be present in and on shell eggs and is a particular concern for children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised.
- Sugar and acid do not sterilise itThe raspberry juice and powdered sugar are sometimes assumed to make the mixture safe. They do not: the water activity and pH of a fruit foam like this are well within the range where salmonella survives, and the float is typically held at room temperature while it is beaten and served.
- No cooked-meringue step exists hereUnlike a Swiss or Italian meringue, where the whites meet boiling syrup or a bain-marie, this recipe relies entirely on cold beating for volume. There is no point in the process at which heat could be introduced without changing the dish. If you want a raspberry float, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg white or a cooked meringue.
- A gillFor reading the original: a gill is a quarter of a pint, so half a cup. The recipe therefore calls for half a cup of sugar with the fruit and another half cup, powdered, in the whites.
- Straining the fruitThe recipe presses the crushed berries through a fine sieve, in its own words 'to avoid the seeds', before the juice is beaten into the whites.
Floats, whips and "snows" of this kind were a common nineteenth-century household treatment for soft fruit that would not keep: raw berries, sugar and egg white beaten cold into something that looked like far more than it was, and made without a stove. Uncooked egg white was unremarkable in a period when eggs were often produced by the household or bought from a known local source; commercial egg distribution and the recognition of egg-associated salmonellosis in the twentieth century are what put recipes like this one out of reach.