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Chocolate Whip
1 cup of milk, 1 1/2 squares of Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate, Pinch of salt, 2 level tablespoonfuls of cornstarch, 2 eggs (yolks), 6 level tablespoonfuls of sugar, 2 teaspoonfuls of vanilla, 5 eggs (whites). Put milk, chocolate and salt in double-boiler; mix cornstarch in a small quantity of cold milk, and stir into the hot milk when the chocolate has been melted; stir until smooth, then cook twelve minutes. Mix together the yolks of the eggs and sugar, then pour the hot mixture over it; cook again one or two minutes, stirring. When very cold, just before serving, add the vanilla and fold in the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs. Pile lightly in a glass dish and serve with lady fingers. A meringue can be made of the whites of the eggs and sugar, then folded in the chocolate mixture, but it does not stand as long.
This is a cooked chocolate cornstarch custard lightened with five raw egg whites, and those whites are the problem: they go into a mixture that is deliberately chilled first, so nothing in the finished dish ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella.
- The whites are never cookedThe instruction is explicit: the base must be "very cold" before the stiffly beaten whites are folded in, and the whip is then piled into a glass dish and served. No heat touches the whites at any point, and the cold custard cannot pasteurise them.
- The quantity is not incidentalFive whites to one cup of milk means the raw portion is the majority of the finished volume by far. This is not a trace of raw egg in a batter that will be baked; it is the body of the dessert.
- The meringue variation is no betterThe alternative given at the end beats the whites with sugar and folds that in. Sugar does not pasteurise egg white, and an uncooked meringue carries exactly the same risk as the plain beaten whites.
- Standing at room temperatureStanding -- The dish is assembled just before serving and held in an open glass bowl. The note that the meringue version "does not stand as long" is about the foam collapsing rather than about temperature, but any raw-egg foam left standing rather than kept cold is poor practice.
- Who it reachesCold whips and snows of this general kind often appear in invalid and nursery cookery of the period, which would put them in front of people least able to tolerate a foodborne infection. Whatever was understood at the time, the risk is understood now.
- Reading the ingredientsBaker's Premium No. 1 was unsweetened baking chocolate in one-ounce squares, so 1 1/2 squares is 1 1/2 oz unsweetened; the sugar is all added separately. If you want a chocolate whip, use a current recipe built on a cooked base or pasteurised whites rather than adapting this one.
Choice Recipes was one of a long series of promotional booklets issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, a chocolate firm that traced itself to a mill on the Neponset River in the 1760s and that spent the late nineteenth century distributing recipe pamphlets to teach American households what to do with baking chocolate beyond drinking it. Many of the recipes carry the names of cooking-school teachers of the period, and the style here is pure cooking-school: a cornstarch-thickened milk base, yolks tempered with sugar, then a great mass of beaten whites folded in at the last moment. "Whip" in this sense simply means a cold dessert made light with beaten egg white, a family that includes prune whip, apple snow and the various "sponges" and "soufflés" served cold; before gelatin desserts became cheap and reliable, beaten white was the ordinary way to make something rich seem airy. The lady fingers on the side are the standard accompaniment of the era.