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Whipped Peach Cream in Baskets
Beat the whites of four eggs until very stiff, then mix in by degrees four level tablespoons of powdered sugar, next add two tablespoons of rich peach syrup (drained from preserved peaches), and stir in lightly one pint of sweet cream. Whisk to a stiff froth. Everything should be very cold before beginning, and keep the bowl containing the cream in a pan of cracked ice while whipping the ingredients. Have ready round individual sponge cakes, scoop out the center until the walls and bottom are only three-fourths of an inch thick, and just before serving fill with the peach cream. If an especially handsome dessert is wanted, brush the outside of the basket with white of egg, and stick all over it halved English walnut meats or pecans.
The dessert is built on four raw egg whites that never see heat, plus a second application of raw white used as glue for the nuts. That is the sticking point, and no amount of chilling addresses it.
- Why it failsThe whites are beaten, sweetened, folded into cream and served — there is no cooking step anywhere. Uncooked shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean egg rather than only on the shell.
- The second raw-egg stepBrushing the outside of the sponge basket with white of egg to fix walnut or pecan halves in place leaves a thin film of raw albumen on the part of the dessert most likely to be handled and eaten. It is not incidental to the recipe; it is the whole decorative scheme.
- Held cold, not held safeThe instruction to keep everything over cracked ice slows bacterial growth but does not reduce it. A raw-egg cream sitting at the table through a course is in the temperature range where any organisms present multiply.
- Who it was served toCold uncooked-egg dishes were a familiar part of period invalid and nursery cookery, and if this was served to children, the elderly or the unwell, those are precisely the groups for whom a salmonella infection is most likely to be serious.
- If you want the dessertUse a current recipe for a peach fool or peach whipped cream, of which there are many that require no raw egg at all.
- Reading the original"Sweet cream" means fresh unsoured cream, i.e. heavy or whipping cream; it is not sweetened. "Powdered sugar" in books of this period generally means sugar ground finer than granulated but usually coarser than modern confectioners' sugar, and it would not have carried the cornstarch added to the modern product.
- The peach syrupThe peach flavour comes from the two tablespoons of rich syrup drained off preserved peaches. Commercial canned peaches in light syrup or juice would give considerably less by comparison, which is worth knowing before substituting.
Sponge cake shells scooped out and filled at the last moment were a familiar device in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American dessert cookery, a way of making individual portions look composed without a mould or a pastry cook. They go by various names in the books of the period — baskets, cases, cups — and the same hollowed cake turns up filled with custard, ice cream or fruit whip. The recipe also shows how the economy of preserving could run: the syrup left in the jar after the peaches were used was too good to waste, so it became the flavouring here. The repeated insistence on cracked ice is a reminder that this was written for kitchens where cold was a purchased commodity to be arranged around the bowl.