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Strawberries with Whipped Cream
Prepare in layers as above, cover with one pint of cream, whites of three eggs and a tea-cup of powdered sugar, whipped together and flavored with strawberry juice.
A two-line addendum to the layered strawberry dish that precedes it in the Fruits chapter, this is a fruit fool topped with a raw-egg-white whipped cream. The cream is the problem: nothing in it is ever heated.
- Why this one cannot be made as writtenThree raw egg whites are whipped into cream and served without any cooking step. Uncooked shell eggs can carry Salmonella, and whites as well as yolks can be contaminated; a dish of this kind is likely to stand at room temperature before it is eaten. Use a current recipe for whipped cream or a cooked meringue instead.
- The cream itselfCream of this period was raw and unpasteurized, skimmed off the top of the day's milk, and its richness varied with the skimming; it was generally heavier than the pouring cream sold now. No stabilizer is called for beyond the egg white.
- "Prepare in layers as above"The instruction points back to the preceding entry in the book, a layered strawberry dish. Read on its own the recipe has no fruit quantity at all.
- A tea-cupIn period usage a tea-cup is smaller than the measuring cup we use, variously reckoned at somewhere between half a cup and three-quarters of a cup. A pint is 2 cups.
- Powdered sugarPeriod powdered sugar was loaf or lump sugar crushed and sifted at home, closer to today's superfine or caster sugar than to the cornstarch-bearing confectioners' sugar sold now.
- Flavored with strawberry juiceThe flavoring is the syrup the sugared berries have thrown off, not an extract. It will also tint the cream.
- YieldA pint of cream plus three whites makes a generous quantity of topping, enough for six to eight servings of layered fruit.
Strawberries with cream belong to the brief, intense American strawberry season of the pre-refrigeration era, when the fruit could not travel and appeared on the table only for the few weeks it was ripe locally. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, whose material originated with Ohio contributors and which was published in Minneapolis in the 1870s, treats fresh fruit as a short-lived luxury and gives it a chapter of its own, mostly with instructions this terse. Beating egg white into whipped cream appears in recipes of the period, though how common the practice was, and what cooks hoped to gain by it, is a matter of inference rather than record. The technique survives in some old-style fools and in Italian meringue-based creams, but with the whites cooked rather than raw.