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Whipped Strawberries and Cream
Whip a pint of cream with two ounces of castor sugar and the whites of two eggs to a very stiff froth; then add the strawberries, which should have the stalks taken off; mix in gradually, pile high on a silver or glass dish, and serve at once.
A straightforward Victorian cream, but it depends on raw egg white folded into an uncooked mixture that is served immediately and never heated at any stage.
- Why this one failsThe two egg whites are eaten raw. Nothing in the method brings them above room temperature, and the cream provides a rich medium held at ambient temperature while it is piled up and carried to table. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and, less often, within the white and yolk; there is no step here that reduces that risk.
- Not the same as raw egg in a batterRaw egg in a cake or custard is brought to temperature later. This dish has no later. If you want a whipped strawberry cream, use a current recipe written for the ingredients now available.
- Castor sugarCaster sugar, the fine-grained British baking sugar. Superfine or bar sugar is the nearest US equivalent; granulated will dissolve, but more slowly and with a grittier result in an uncooked cream.
- A pint of creamAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, roughly 2.4 US cups. The "cream" intended for whipping here would be something close to modern double or heavy cream; anything lighter will not hold the stiff froth the recipe demands.
- "Pile high and serve at once"This is not only decorative advice. A cream lightened with egg white will slacken and weep as it stands, and strawberries release juice that thins it further. The instruction tells you the dish has little or no holding time.
- QuantityNo yield is given. A pint of cream with fruit folded through serves six to eight as a dessert course.
Adding whipped egg white to sweetened cream appears in nineteenth-century cookery, and recalls the older English syllabubs and "snows", where the froth was the point and the mixture was expected to be built up high on glass or silver so that guests saw the volume before they tasted it. Strawberries appear here without any mention of season because they had one: the dish belongs to a few weeks of English summer, before refrigerated shipping made soft fruit a year-round item. The reliance on raw egg white also marks the period, coming from kitchens that had no notion of the pathogens now known to travel with eggs.