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Currants, Iced
Whisk the white of an egg thoroughly until firm, then mix it with three dessert-spoonfuls of cold water. Dip into this exceedingly fine bunches of ripe red and white currants, one bunch at a time. Let them drain for a minute, then roll them in finely-pounded white sugar, and lay them carefully on sheets of paper to dry. The sugar will crystallise on the currants, and will have a very good effect. A pretty dish may be made by icing in this way different coloured fruits suitable for dessert, and arranging them tastefully on a dish. Time, four or five hours to crystallise.
A Victorian dessert-table garnish: fruit painted with raw egg white and dredged in sugar, left to dry into a frosted shell. The technique is sound but the binder is not, since nothing here is ever cooked.
- Why this one failsThe egg white is applied raw and eaten raw — no heat, no acid, no sugar syrup, nothing that would reduce Salmonella on shell eggs. Four or five hours at room temperature to dry is time spent in the range where any contamination present multiplies rather than diminishes.
- The fruit does not helpCurrants are not washed and dried in the original, and the sugar shell traps whatever is on the surface of the berry along with the egg. There is no step at any point that brings the coating above room temperature.
- If you want frosted fruitUse a current recipe built on pasteurised egg white or another food-safe binder. That is the whole of the change required, and it is not ours to improvise here.
- Dessert-spoonfulsA Victorian dessertspoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon — reckon it at about two teaspoons, so three of them is roughly two tablespoons of water.
- Finely-pounded white sugarIn period practice this meant loaf sugar broken and pounded in a mortar, then sifted; the nearest modern equivalent is caster sugar. Coarser granulated sugar is unlikely to adhere evenly, and icing sugar tends to dissolve into a paste.
- Bunches, not berriesRed and white currants were dipped on the stem so the whole truss could be lifted, drained and laid down without crushing. The instruction to do one bunch at a time presumably keeps the wet bunches from sticking to one another.
- Drying conditionsFrosted fruit only crystallises properly in a dry, cool, airy place. In a humid kitchen the sugar weeps and the shell stays tacky however long it stands.
- Its actual purposeThis was decoration for a dessert service rather than a dish in itself — a few bunches arranged among other fruit. The book's suggestion of mixing colours reflects that: it is a centrepiece, not a portion.
Frosted or "iced" fruit belongs to the Victorian dessert course, the final service of a formal dinner when the cloth was drawn and the table was dressed with fruit, nuts, bonbons and sweetmeats arranged for display as much as for eating. Red and white currants, grown widely in British kitchen gardens and glut-ripe for only a few weeks in high summer, were ideal for the treatment because they came in neat trusses that could be handled by the stem and looked well banked in a glass dish. The same egg-white-and-sugar method was applied to grapes, cherries, plums and even flowers and leaves, and it survives in essentially unchanged form on cakes today, though modern versions substitute a pasteurised binder for the raw white.