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Strawberry Foam
3 egg whites 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice 1/3 cup sugar 1/2 cup strawberries cut into fourths A few grains salt Add the salt to the whites, beat till foamy, add the lemon juice, beat till stiff, add the sugar gradually, continuing to beat, and when very stiff, fold in the berries. Serve in sherbet glasses with a large berry on the stem on top.
This is an uncooked meringue: three raw egg whites are beaten stiff, sweetened, and served straight from the bowl. Nothing in the method brings the eggs anywhere near a safe temperature, so the recipe cannot be recommended today.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites are beaten and served cold. Salmonella can be present both on the shell and within the egg itself, and beating, sugaring and acidulating do not reduce it. Any uncooked egg preparation carries that risk, and the risk falls hardest on children, older people, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised.
- Lemon juice is not a safeguardThe half tablespoon of juice is there to help the whites hold their structure, not to sterilise anything. The pH of a sweetened meringue foam is nowhere near low enough to control bacteria, and the sugar in this quantity does not bind enough water to matter either.
- It is meant to standHolding it is the danger -- Spooning the foam into sherbet glasses and dressing each with a berry takes time. A raw egg foam left at room temperature is the worst case, since any bacteria present multiply while it sits.
- Cut fruit adds a second problemStrawberries hulled and quartered by hand introduce surface contamination of their own into a mixture that will never be cooked. Uncooked berries are a recognised vehicle for foodborne illness independent of the eggs.
- Pasteurised whites are not a straight substitutionThey are safer, but they whip differently and will not behave as this method assumes. If you want a fruit foam of this kind, use a current recipe written around pasteurised or cooked egg white rather than adapting these proportions.
- Scale, for contextThree whites with a third of a cup of sugar and half a cup of berries is a small dessert; the recipe gives no yield, but it would fill only a few sherbet glasses. That is a modest amount of food for the quantity of raw egg involved.
Uncooked egg-white foams lightened with fruit were a standing fixture of American cookery-school teaching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the whipped white was prized as a cheap, showy way to turn a half cup of fruit into a dessert for a household. The genre runs from snow puddings and "whips" to the apple sauce foams and prune whips that fill the fruit chapters of these books. Domestic-science writers of the period were alert to the dangers of tainted milk and spoiled meat, but the specific hazard of Salmonella in intact shell eggs was not understood as it is now, and recipes like this one passed without comment. The sherbet glass and the single large berry perched on its stem suggest a light course, arranged rather than cooked.