Fruit Whip
Beat one quarter cup of confectioners' sugar into the white of an egg, gradually, until the mixture is stiff enough to stand up, and add one and a half cups of crushed fruit, either fresh or canned.
If canned fruit is used strain out most of the juice. Put in glass dish and place on the ice to chill.
A fruit fool built on raw, unheated egg white — a construction that was routine in the icebox era and is no longer considered safe. The notes below explain the specific problem and translate the period language.
- The raw egg white is the problemThe white is beaten with sugar and fruit and served cold; nothing in the method brings it above room temperature. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the white as well as the yolk, and there is no step here that reduces it.
- Chilling does not make it safe"Place on the ice" slows bacterial growth but kills nothing. A dish held for hours in a domestic refrigerator, then left out at the table, sits in exactly the conditions this warning exists for.
- Sugar is not a safeguardA quarter cup of confectioners' sugar in one egg white is nowhere near the concentration that would inhibit bacteria, and the fruit adds moisture rather than acid enough to matter. Use a current published recipe for an uncooked fruit whip instead.
- "Place on the ice"The instruction refers to the ice compartment of an icebox or a bowl set into cracked ice, not a freezer. Chilling here is for setting and serving temperature, not storage.
- Crushed fruitThis means fruit mashed with a fork or potato masher to a rough pulp rather than pureed. Canned fruit was commonly packed in syrup, which is presumably why the recipe tells you to strain most of the juice off; excess liquid would thin the foam.
- YieldOne egg white and a cup and a half of fruit gives perhaps three small glass servings. The volume falls as the foam drains, so it is best served soon after making.
Fruit whips, snows and fools all belong to a family of desserts that use beaten egg white to stretch a small amount of fruit into something that looks generous — a trick often said to have suited households where cream was an expense and gelatine a nuisance. Books of the 1920s and 1930s, when electric refrigeration was spreading into ordinary kitchens, are full of them: they need no cooking, no oven and no fuel, which is precisely the appeal of a title like Cook and Be Cool, aimed at hot-weather menus. The choice of confectioners' sugar may well be deliberate; its cornstarch content and fine grain are generally thought to help the foam hold longer than granulated would, though the writer does not say so. That such recipes were printed without hesitation reflects a period in which raw egg in an uncooked dessert was unremarkable, an assumption that egg-safety guidance has since overturned.