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Raspberries, Iced for Dessert
Take as many fine freshly-gathered raspberries as will be wanted. Whisk the white of an egg, and stir in with it two table-spoonfuls of cold spring water. Dip the raspberries one by one in the liquor, drain them, and roll them in finely powdered and sifted sugar. Lay them on paper to dry, and arrange them prettily with other fruits in a dessert-dish. Time to dry, six to eight hours. Probable cost of rasberries, 2d. to 6d. per pint.
The technique is the familiar one for frosted fruit and flowers, but the coating here is raw egg white that is never heated at any stage, and the coated berries then sit at room temperature for the better part of a working day.
- Raw egg white, never cookedNothing in this method brings the egg above room temperature: it is whisked, thinned with cold water, painted onto fruit and air-dried. Salmonella in and on shell eggs is destroyed by heat, and there is no heat step here. The sugar crust does not sterilise anything.
- Six to eight hours at room temperatureThe drying time is the second problem. A thin film of diluted egg protein held for most of a day in a warm kitchen is a growth medium, and the two tablespoons of water dilute the white further, slowing the drying and extending the window. Anyone intending to make frosted fruit today should follow a current recipe.
- Raspberries themselvesSoft berries are among the most fragile fruit in the kitchen, and washing collapses them, so recipes of this kind generally assume the fruit is used dry and unwashed. The dip-and-dry treatment here assumes fruit that has come straight off the cane, as "freshly-gathered" implies.
- Powdered and sifted sugarIn British books of the period this means loaf or lump sugar pounded fine and passed through a sieve to remove lumps. Caster sugar is the nearest modern equivalent; icing sugar tends to dissolve into the coating and gives a dull rather than a crystalline finish.
- The price noteTwo to six pence per pint is consistent with later-nineteenth-century British soft-fruit prices, and the wide range reflects how sharply they moved between early forced fruit and midsummer glut.
- Yield and useNo quantity is given because the berries are decoration rather than a dish — a scattering arranged among other fruit on a dessert stand at the end of a formal dinner.
Frosted or "iced" fruit belongs to the Victorian dessert course, the last service of a formal dinner, when fresh and preserved fruits, nuts and sweetmeats were set out to be admired as much as eaten. The same egg-white-and-sugar treatment was applied to other small fruits such as grapes and currants and to flowers including violets and rose petals, and it appears in English household books through the nineteenth century as a way of making ordinary garden fruit look like something from a confectioner's window. Cassell's, a mass-market dictionary aimed at middle-class households, is characteristically practical about it: the entry gives a drying time and a price per pint, as its entries generally do. Raspberries were a seasonal fruit that travelled badly and was best used soon after picking.