Float
To a common-sized glass bowl of cream, sweetened with loaf sugar and flavored with wine, take the whites of six eggs, three large tablespoonfuls sugar, and three of fruit jelly. Do not beat the eggs to a froth, but put in the jelly and sugar and beat all together.--Mrs. T
This is a Southern "float" — sweetened cream with a whipped, jellied egg-white foam heaped on top. The foam is never cooked at any stage, which is why the recipe cannot be recommended as written.
- Raw whites, no heat anywhereSix egg whites are beaten with sugar and jelly and served straight onto the cream. Nothing in the method brings the whites to a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, which can be present inside intact shell eggs and is not removed by washing them. Unlike a meringue that goes into an oven, or a custard that is cooked over water, there is no later step to fall back on.
- Why the old version worked well enoughWhy the old version may have carried less risk -- Eggs in a nineteenth-century household were often much fresher than shop eggs, and dishes like this were meant to be served promptly and kept cool. Whatever the conditions were, the risk was lower rather than absent, and it does not transfer to eggs of unknown age served at a modern table.
- The cream compounds itA bowl of sweetened cream standing at room temperature under a foam topping is a good growth medium, and the recipe says nothing about holding time.
- If you want to make a floatUse a current recipe, one built either on a cooked custard base or on pasteurized egg white.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in hard cones or loaves, broken up and pounded before use. Ordinary granulated sugar answers for it; the recipe's later "three large tablespoonfuls sugar" is presumably the same sugar, though it does not say so.
- "Flavored with wine"No wine is named and no amount is given; a sweet fortified wine of the sherry or Madeira type would suit the dish. Whatever is used, it is not a preservative and is not present in enough quantity to make the dish safe.
- "Common-sized glass bowl"Genuinely unquantified. The scale of the foam (six whites) points to a shared serving bowl for a family table rather than an individual glass, but no capacity can be recovered from the text.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia and neighbouring housekeepers, credits recipes to individual contributors, and the abbreviated attribution "Mrs. T" is of a piece with that habit. A "float" belongs to the family of dishes related to the English floating island, in which a whipped froth is set adrift on cream, wine or custard — the name describes what the foam does. What distinguishes this version is the fruit jelly beaten into the whites rather than the whites being whipped separately to a froth: the jelly, with the sugar, gives the mixture body and color, and the kind of jelly is left to the cook. The instruction "do not beat the eggs to a froth" is the hinge of the original method.