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Apricot Whip
1 lb. dried apricots Whipped cream Cornstarch 3 eggs Boil apricots till tender and sweeten to taste. When cool, whip very smooth, add the stiffly beaten whites of eggs and beat all well together. Serve with whipped cream or with a custard made of the egg yolks and thickened with cornstarch.
Mrs. F. J. Wagner.
This is a fruit-and-egg-white foam of the sort that filled church cookbooks before refrigeration was general, and it has one fatal flaw: the egg whites are never cooked. The notes below explain the ingredient list and the hazard rather than offering a way around it.
- The whites are eaten rawThe apricots are boiled, then cooled, then the stiffly beaten whites are folded in and the dish goes straight to the table. Nothing in the method brings the egg to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the sweetened purée is held at room temperature while it is beaten and served. Use a current recipe for a fruit whip, one built on pasteurized whites or set with gelatin.
- Whipped cream, unspecifiedThe ingredient line names whipped cream with no quantity and no instruction. Cream in a book of this kind may well have been unpasteurized, a further reason to treat the dish as printed with caution.
- "Apricots" is ambiguousNo amount and no form is given. A recipe of this date could mean fresh fruit in season, home-canned halves in syrup, or dried apricots, which is why the instruction is simply to boil until tender. Dried fruit needs considerably more water than fresh; the original assumes the cook already knows which she has.
- "Whip very smooth" means the fruit, not the creamThe cooled apricots are beaten to a smooth purée before the whites go in. In a hand-powered kitchen this meant a sieve or a colander and a wooden spoon; the modern equivalent is a blender or food mill.
- Cornstarch belongs to the sauceThe cornstarch and the three yolks are for the optional custard poured around the whip, not for the whip itself. The custard is cooked, which is what makes it the one component of this recipe that survives contact with modern practice.
- YieldThe book gives no indication at all, and since no quantity of fruit is specified any figure is guesswork; three whites would suggest a few small servings.
Fruit "whips" and "snows" were a standard of American community cookbooks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: cheap, showy, and made from what was already in the house. Beaten egg white was among the cook's most reliable aerators before commercial gelatin and mechanical mixers were common, and a stiff meringue folded into sweetened fruit pulp gave the volume and pallor that Victorian dessert taste prized. Apricots reached the Midwest mainly dried or canned, arriving by rail from California orchards whose output expanded sharply in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, so a contributor was more likely working from a package or a jar than from a tree. The frugal second half of the recipe is the giveaway of the genre: the whites go into the dessert, the yolks go into the sauce, and nothing is wasted. Community cookbooks of this kind were sold to raise money, and each dish carried its contributor's name, which made them as much a social register as a set of instructions.