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Cream, Whipped, with Vanilla
Boil half a pod of vanilla in a cupful of new milk for twenty minutes. Strain, and add it to a pint of thick cream. Sweeten with two tablespoonfuls of sugar, and mix in the whites of three eggs beaten to a firm froth. Three or four drops of vanilla essence may be put with the cream instead of boiling the pod. Choose a cool place for work of this kind. Probable cost, about 1s. 10d. Sufficient to fill eight or ten glasses.
The vanilla infusion and the cream are straightforward; the problem is the three raw egg whites, which are folded in and never heated at any point.
- Raw egg white is the failure pointNothing in this recipe reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. The whites are beaten to a froth and mixed cold into cold cream, then held in glasses and eaten as-is. Shell eggs today are still a recognised salmonella risk, and the whites are not a safe exception to that.
- The dish is designed to sit aroundThe dish is made up in quantity -- Eight to ten glasses of an uncooked cream-and-egg-white mixture, held in a "cool place" that in a kitchen without mechanical refrigeration meant a larder, gives contamination time to multiply. If you want an uncooked cream dessert, use a current recipe built around pasteurised egg product or no egg at all.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, straight from the dairy and unskimmed - the point of the word was that it had not yet had cream taken off it or begun to sour. Milk of the period would generally not have been pasteurised.
- Half a pod of vanillaHalf a whole bean is the sense. Twenty minutes' boiling in a cup of milk extracts a good deal, and the strained milk carries the flavour into the cream. The recipe offers three or four drops of vanilla essence as an alternative.
- "Thick cream"Rich, unskimmed cream of the kind sold now as whipping or double cream. Adding a cupful of infused milk to a pint of it thins it appreciably, and the beaten whites supply volume.
- "Choose a cool place"Sound advice for a kitchen without refrigeration: warm cream will not hold a whip, and warm dairy left standing spoils fast. In this recipe the instruction is a hygiene warning as much as a technical one, and it is not sufficient.
- The costOne shilling and tenpence, in pre-decimal money, for eight to ten glasses. Cream was the expensive part; vanilla, then still hand-pollinated and imported, was the luxury the recipe is named for.
Whipped cream lightened with beaten egg white and scented with vanilla belongs to a family of late-Victorian "creams" that filled the sweet course between the jellies and the ices — showy in glass, and requiring no oven. Vanilla was still a comparatively costly flavouring in the period, grown chiefly in Réunion and Mexico and hand-pollinated, which is why the book offers the bottled essence as the economical substitute and treats the pod as the better article. The instruction to work in a cool place is the clearest sign of the kitchen it was written for: no mechanical refrigeration, a marble slab or a north-facing larder, and dishes assembled as late in the day as the cook could manage.