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French Cream Filling
3/4 cup thick cream 1/4 cup milk 1/4 cup powdered sugar White one egg 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Dilute cream with milk and beat until stiff, using Dover egg-beater. Add sugar, white of egg beaten until stiff, and vanilla.
A whipped-cream cake filling of the plainest kind, lightened with raw beaten egg white. The technique is straightforward, but the uncooked egg is the reason this one belongs on the shelf rather than in the bowl.
- Why it failsThe egg white is folded in raw and never heated at any point. Shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella, which is concentrated in no single part of the egg and is not neutralised by beating, sugar, or chilling. A filling like this then sits between cake layers at room temperature, which is close to ideal for bacterial growth. For a whipped cream filling today, use a current recipe.
- "Thick cream"In books of this period this means unhomogenised cream skimmed from the top of the milk, roughly 30-40% butterfat and considerably heavier than modern pouring cream. The dilution with milk in the original is there to bring an unusually rich cream down to whipping consistency.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this era "powdered sugar" usually means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name now. The difference matters for how much the filling stiffens and holds.
- Dover egg-beaterThe Dover was the best-known hand-cranked rotary beater, patented in the 1870s and widely enough sold that 'Dover' came to stand loosely for rotary beaters generally. Its appearance by name tells you the author expected a beater rather than a whisk or a fork.
- YieldThe original gives no yield. A cup of liquid whipped, plus a beaten egg white folded in, makes appreciably more than the cup you start with; enough for the filling of one layer cake.
- KeepingEven setting the egg aside, a filling of this kind has no stabiliser at all and will weep as it stands. It would have had to be made and eaten the same day.