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Angel Food
Whites 3 eggs 1/2 cup powdered sugar 1 quart cream whip 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla Beat eggs until stiff, fold in sugar, cream whip, and flavoring; line a mould with Delmonico Ice Cream, fill with the mixture, cover, pack in salt and ice, and let stand two hours.
This is not a sauce but a frozen bombe: a shell of ice cream lined into a mould and filled with a raw meringue-and-cream mixture, then set in an ice-and-salt pack. The vocabulary and the method both need translating, and the egg whites are the reason the dish cannot be made as printed.
- Uncooked egg whitesThe whites are beaten raw, folded with sugar and cream, and then only chilled. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; a mould held at freezer temperature for two hours preserves whatever was in the shell eggs and serves it cold. Nothing in the method brings the whites near a safe temperature, and the sugar is far too little to act as a preservative.
- Two hours is a set, not a cookThe salt-and-ice pack works down to roughly 10 to 20F, which firms the mixture but does no more. If you want a frozen meringue dessert, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked Italian meringue.
- "Cream whip"A quart of heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks before folding. A quart of cream whips to roughly two quarts of foam, so the finished mixture is bulky and needs a large mould.
- Powdered sugar"Powdered sugar" -- In period American usage this could mean finely ground or sifted sugar rather than the modern cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar. Either dissolves more readily than coarse granulated sugar in an uncooked meringue.
- Delmonico Ice CreamA cross-reference to another recipe in the same book; its composition is not given on this page. The mould is lined with the ice cream and the meringue mixture added inside it.
- Packing in salt and iceRock salt and crushed ice in roughly one part salt to three or four of ice, packed around a covered metal mould buried to the lid. The cover and a strip of fat or paper around the seam kept brine out of the dessert.
"Angel food" was an American name attached to preparations built on beaten egg whites, the cake being the famous case; the label also appears on white meringue creams, frozen or otherwise, apparently on the logic of paleness and lightness. This version belongs to the era of the moulded bombe, when a household with a reliable ice supply could line a mould with one frozen mixture, fill it with a second, and pack the whole in salt and ice to set without churning. The cross-reference to Delmonico Ice Cream carries the name of the New York restaurant, which was attached to any number of rich preparations in period cookbooks, often with no demonstrable connection to that kitchen.