Home › A Cluster of Berries › Strawberry Whips
Strawberry Whips
Make as for Apple Snow, allowing one cupful of strawberries and one cup of sugar to each white of egg. Mash the berries well, then proceed as for Apple Snow. Serve in sherbet cups.
A one-line recipe that leans entirely on a cross-reference: it is a fruit purée folded into raw beaten egg white, sweetened heavily and served cold without cooking. That last point is the problem.
- Why it fails todayThe egg white is never heated at any stage, and the finished whip is served straight from the bowl into cups. Raw shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella, which beating and sugaring do nothing to reduce, and the dessert is then held at room temperature while it is dished up and eaten. Use a current recipe if you want a strawberry whip.
- The chain of reference"Make as for Apple Snow" sends the reader to another recipe not reproduced here; apple snow of this period is generally raw white whisked to a stiff froth with sweetened fruit pulp beaten in. Nothing in that sequence introduces heat, so the hazard is inherent to the method rather than to any one step.
- The sugar ratioOne cup of sugar to one cup of berries for a single egg white is a very high proportion of sugar by weight. Sugar also helps an egg-white froth hold, so the heavy sweetening is not purely a matter of taste.
- Sherbet cupsIn 1900s usage a sherbet cup is a small stemmed glass rather than a modern dessert bowl, so the instruction implies a modest portion.
- Mashing versus purée"Mash the berries well" with a fork or wooden spoon leaves visible pulp and seeds. A blender gives a thin, weeping purée that collapses the froth faster, which is the opposite of what the original method wants.
- Holding timeWhips of this construction separate fairly quickly, with a watery fruit layer settling out. The recipe gives no keeping instructions and assumes the cups go from bowl to table.
"Snow" and "whip" desserts are among the oldest froths in the English kitchen, descending from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century practice of whisking egg white with sugar and fruit or wine until it stood in peaks — work done with a bundle of twigs long before wire whisks. Apple snow itself appears to be a later development, though it became the pattern recipe that later variations refer back to. By the early 1900s, apple snow had become a template: the compiler needed only to say "make as for Apple Snow" and give the proportions, and the reader supplied the rest. Strawberries were an obvious substitution in a chapter of berries, since they mash to a pulp without cooking and colour the froth pink, a quality Victorian and Edwardian dessert writing prized. The recipe also reflects a period habit of relying on raw egg white as a cheap aerator — a habit that food safety practice has since retired.