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Raspberry Whip
1 1/4 cups raspberries 1 cup powdered sugar White 1 egg Put ingredients in bowl and beat with wire whisk until stiff enough to hold in shape; about thirty minutes will be required for beating. Pile lightly on dish, chill, surround with lady fingers, and serve with Boiled Custard. Strawberry Whip may be prepared in same way.
A Victorian fruit whip: raw egg white, sugar and berries beaten by hand into a foam and served cold. The method depends on the egg white never being heated, which is where it fails today.
- The egg is never cookedThe white goes into the bowl raw and the finished whip is only chilled, so nothing in the dish reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Whole raw whites, held at room temperature through a long beating and then served to a table that may include children or elderly guests, is the exact use current food-safety guidance rules out. If you want a fruit whip, work from a modern recipe built around a cooked meringue or a pasteurised product.
- The custard compounds itThe custard - Boiled Custard, the accompaniment called for here, is itself an egg sauce, though unlike the whip it is at least cooked. It is the uncooked white in the whip, not the custard, that carries the risk.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered sugar" means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioner's sugar sold under that name now. The two behave differently in a foam.
- Thirty minutes of beatingThe time is not an exaggeration. Sugar in this proportion, roughly a cup to a single white, suppresses the foam badly, and a hand whisk was the only tool assumed. It also means the mixture sits warm and aerated for half an hour, which is the least favourable condition possible for a raw white.
- Lady fingersThe crisp, dry sort are closest to what the author had in mind; soft sponge ladyfingers will go limp against a wet whip.
- ScaleOne white and a cup and a quarter of fruit makes a small quantity; the recipe gives no yield.
Fruit whips belong to a family of chilled desserts - snow among them - that ran through English and American cookery from the eighteenth century onward. A single egg white and a handful of berries could be beaten up into a bowlful of pale pink foam. The long beating time recorded here is a reminder that the rotary egg beater, patented in the nineteenth century, had not displaced the wire whisk in every kitchen. The instruction that strawberries may be substituted reflects how these books were used - one technique, applied to whatever soft fruit the season offered.