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Moonshine
Beat whites of six eggs, add six tablespoons of sugar, beat with the eggs, then add one cup of jelly. Set on the ice. Serve with whipped cream.
— Mrs. Price H. Perry
A four-ingredient icebox dessert from the era before anyone worried about raw egg. The terms are easy enough to read; the problem is that nothing in it is ever cooked.
- Why this one failsThe egg whites are beaten, sweetened, folded with jelly and chilled — they never reach any temperature at all. Salmonella in shell eggs is a surface and occasionally an interior contaminant, and whipping and refrigeration do nothing to it. Use a current recipe if you want a dessert of this type.
- Cold does not help"Set on the ice" was the whole safety plan, and it only slows bacterial growth. A meringue foam left to chill and then served at table is a familiar vehicle for this kind of illness.
- "Jelly"Here this most likely means a firm home-made fruit jelly — currant, quince and crabapple were common household kinds — rather than a gelatin dessert or a jam. A jelly of that sort would be stiff enough to break up with a fork and beat into the whites.
- "Set on the ice"The icebox, not a freezer. The dish was meant to firm up and chill, not to freeze, so the reference is to roughly refrigerator temperature.
- Whipped creamPeriod whipped cream was unsweetened or barely sweetened, whipped by hand from heavy cream that had not been ultra-pasteurized. The recipe does not specify how it was served.
- ScaleSix whites with a cup of jelly makes a large bowl; the recipe states no yield and no manner of serving beyond "Serve with whipped cream."
The name has nothing to do with illicit whiskey: "moonshine" was a period dessert name for a pale, cold and airy confection, of a piece with such names as "snow pudding" and "apple snow." All of them belong to a family of whipped-white confections found in American community cookbooks. Such receipts were prized precisely because they were quick, required no oven on a hot day, and made a showing at table out of very little; the fact that they were also entirely raw went unremarked, since the pathogen risk in shell eggs was not understood until well into the twentieth century. The attribution to Mrs. Price H. Perry is typical of the genre — village fundraising books collected dishes under the contributor's married name, the mark of a neighborly compilation.