Ann Orr
STRAWBERRY WHIP
1¼ cups strawberries 1 cup powdered sugar White 1 egg Put in bowl, beat with wire whisk until stiff enough to hold in shape, about thirty minutes. Pile lightly on dish, chill, surround with lady fingers and serve with boiled custard.
This makes a very palatable dessert.
Truly yours Ann Orr
BAKED HAM
Rub ham well with baking soda and scrub with warm water. Place in baking pan and add two quarts of sweet cider boiling hot. Water may be substituted for cider.
Cook Rub a chopped onion, brown sugar and a little cinnamon over top of ham and put into the oven. slowly for five or six hours.
Sincerest wishes,
Two contributions run together on one page: an uncooked strawberry whip and a slow-baked ham. The whip is the problem — it is a raw egg white folded with fruit and sugar, eaten as it stands.
- The raw egg whiteNothing in the strawberry whip is ever heated. A shell egg carries a real risk of Salmonella, and beating for thirty minutes does nothing to it. If you want a fruit whip, use a current recipe built around pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue.
- Boiled custard is not a rescueThe custard is served alongside, not cooked with the whip, so it does not bring the raw white anywhere near a safe temperature. Treat the two components separately when you judge the dish.
- Powdered sugar, 1900s senseIn books of this era "powdered sugar" usually means finely ground granulated sugar, not the modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch. The distinction matters in an uncooked dessert, where cornstarch reads chalky.
- Thirty minutes of whiskingThat figure is honest for a wire whisk and a hand: a cup and a quarter of crushed berries carries a lot of water, and the mass has to be beaten stiff enough to hold a peak against it. A stand mixer does the same work in a fraction of the time.
- The ham's garbled sentenceThe line has been broken in typesetting. It should read: rub the top with chopped onion, brown sugar and a little cinnamon, put it in the oven, and cook slowly for five or six hours.
- The soda scrub tells you the hamRubbing with baking soda and scrubbing in warm water points to a dry-cured country ham with a hard, sometimes mouldy rind. Most modern supermarket hams are wet-cured and sold fully cooked, in which case neither the scrub nor the long bake applies.
- Sweet ciderUnfermented apple cider, not hard cider and not vinegar. Two quarts of it, added boiling hot, go into the pan before the ham goes into the oven.
History: Books like this one were assembled by collecting recipes from contributors and printing them with their sign-offs intact — hence the "Truly yours" and "Sincerest wishes" left standing in the text. The recipes are usually short and domestic. Fruit "whips" — a stiffly beaten egg white carrying crushed berries, apple sauce or prune pulp, piled up and chilled — were a fixture of American dessert cookery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, valued because they were cheap, looked lavish and required no oven. Boiled custard and ladyfingers are a common accompaniment. The ham belongs to a different world: a whole cured ham baked in cider for most of a day was holiday and hospitality cooking, and the soda scrub is a reminder that hams then often arrived whole, hard and salty.