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Caledonian Cream
Mix thoroughly two ounces of raspberry jam, two ounces of red currant jelly, and two ounces of finely-powdered sugar, with the whites of two eggs which have been beaten to a firm froth. Beat them for three-quarters of an hour. This makes a very pretty cream, inexpensive and good. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for a small dish.
A whipped uncooked cream of the sort Victorian and Edwardian households made constantly, and the one that has aged worst: the egg whites are never heated at any point.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe whole preparation is beaten cold and served cold. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and, less often, within the white and yolk, and nothing in this method brings the mixture anywhere near the 71C/160F needed to inactivate it. Anyone cooking for children, pregnant women, the elderly or the immune-compromised should treat an unheated shell-egg foam as off the table; use a current recipe formulated for pasteurised egg product instead.
- Why the long beating is not a safeguardThree-quarters of an hour of whisking does nothing bactericidal, and friction heat is negligible. The length probably reflects what a hand whisk in an open bowl needed to build a foam stiff enough to hold jam and jelly in suspension, though the recipe gives no reason.
- The 8d and the "small dish"Probable cost is given as eightpence. Six ounces of jam, jelly and sugar with two whites is what the book calls sufficient for a small dish; how many that served is not stated.
- Red currant jellyStill sold, though far less common than it was; against the flat sweetness of the raspberry jam it supplies sharpness.
- Powdered sugarIn this book that means sugar crushed fine, closer to modern caster sugar than to the cornflour-blended icing sugar sold as powdered sugar in the United States.
This belongs to what the Victorians called the "creams" rom custcustard-set custard-set moulds through to whipped foams containing no cream at all, as here. The Scottish tag is loose: Caledonian cream was one of a run of national names (Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Swiss creams) often attached to slight variations on the same few methods, and in other books of the period the same title covers a marmalade-and-cream whip. What the recipe genuinely records is a preserve-cupboard economy. A household that had put up raspberry jam and currant jelly in summer could turn six ounces of it into a dinner-party sweet for pennies, provided someone had three-quarters of an hour and a strong arm.