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Mulberry Snow Cream
Put a pint of mulberries into an enamelled stewpan with half a breakfast-cupful of sugar and the juice of a lemon; allow them to stew for half an hour very gently, then put into a glass dish to cool. Whip half a pint of cream or boiled custard to a stiff froth with the whites of two eggs and a little sugar. As the cream becomes stiff, set it on the fruit, and serve at once.
A late-Victorian fruit fool in the older "snow" style, where whipped cream and egg white are heaped over stewed fruit rather than folded through it. Two things need attention: the vague Victorian cup measures and the raw white.
- A pint of mulberriesFruit here is measured by volume, not weight: a pint of berries is roughly 12 oz / 340 g. Ripe black mulberries stain everything they touch, so work over a board you do not mind marking.
- Half a breakfast-cupful of sugarA breakfast cup is around 10 fl oz, so half is about 5 fl oz of sugar — roughly 100-120 g. Mulberries vary enormously in sweetness; start with two-thirds of that and taste before the fruit goes cold.
- Half a pint of creamAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Use cream of at least 35 per cent fat or it will not hold the shape the recipe expects.
- The enamelled stewpan mattersMulberries are heavily pigmented and the added lemon juice makes the mixture acid; anthocyanin pigments can dull and take on a metallic edge in bare cast iron, aluminium or unlined copper. Enamel, stainless steel or glass is the point of the instruction.
- Half an hour is too longHalf an hour is too long for very ripe fruit -- ripe mulberries collapse in ten to fifteen minutes over a low heat. Cook only until the juice runs freely and the berries slump, or you will have jam rather than fruit under the snow.
- Raw egg whiteThe whites are never cooked. Use pasteurised whites, or eggs from a scheme that pasteurises or vaccinates against salmonella, and keep the dish cold and eat it the day it is made — this is not one to leave out at room temperature.
- Whipping methodWhipping cream and whites together, as written, is awkward and gives a slack foam. Whip the cream to soft peaks, whip the whites separately with the sugar to a stiff meringue, then fold the two together and heap them on the cooled fruit.
- Serve at once means itAn uncooked cream-and-white snow begins to weep within the hour, and the fruit juice bleeds up into it. Assemble at the table if you can.
- YieldEnough for four small glasses, or two generous ones.
"Snow" desserts — cream and egg white beaten to a froth and piled over fruit or wine — run through English cookery from the sixteenth century onward, close cousins to the syllabub and the fruit fool, and they survived into Victorian books largely unchanged in principle. Mulberries earned their place because the black mulberry, Morus nigra, was a fixture of older English gardens and country-house grounds; the trees were widely planted in the seventeenth century, an enthusiasm often traced to James I's failed scheme to establish silk production in England, though the black mulberry is the wrong species for silkworms. The fruit almost never reached market, since it bruises and ferments within a day of picking, so recipes for it appear in books aimed at households with their own tree. That domestic origin explains the loose measures here: a cook with a mulberry in the garden knew what her own fruit needed.