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Strawberry Filling
1 cup thick cream 1/3 cup sugar White 1 egg 1/2 cup strawberries 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Beat cream until stiff, using Dover egg-beater, add sugar, white of egg beaten until stiff, strawberries mashed, and vanilla.
A whipped-cream cake filling from the era before refrigeration was reliable, and before raw egg was understood as a hazard. The vocabulary needs translating, and one ingredient makes the filling unsafe as written.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe beaten white is folded into cold cream and spread between cake layers, so nothing in the recipe ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Shell eggs in this country are not pasteurised, and the filling then sits at room temperature inside a cake. Use a current recipe for a whipped filling instead.
- Unrefrigerated dairySweetened cream mashed with fruit is a good growth medium, and the recipe gives no instruction to chill or keep the filled cake cold. Even setting the egg aside, the keeping assumptions behind this recipe do not match modern practice.
- Thick creamThis means heavy cream, roughly 36 percent butterfat or higher, i.e. cream rich enough to whip stiff.
- Dover egg-beaterThe Dover was the standard American hand-crank rotary beater, patented in the 1870s and so common that cookbooks used the brand name as a generic instruction. It means nothing more than whip by hand rather than stir.
- Half a cup of strawberriesMashed before going in, so the juice will thin the cream; the recipe has you whip the cream stiff before anything else is added.