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Pineapple Ice Box Cake
Mayme Morris.
Dissolve ¼ C sugar in 2 T water in double boiler. Add gradually 2 beaten egg yolks, stirring until thick and smooth. Cool. Cream ½ C butter. Gradually work in 1 C Confectioner's sugar and add cool egg mixture. Add ½ C drained crushed pineapple. Fold in 2 stiffly beaten egg whites with ¼ t vanilla. Pour mixture into a pan lined with split lady fingers. Place in icebox 12 hours. Garnish.
Mrs. J. A. Treptow.
An unbaked refrigerator cake of the 1930s type, set only by chilled butter and whipped egg white. The construction is straightforward, but the egg handling puts it outside what a current kitchen should serve.
- Raw egg white is the reason to stopThe two stiffly beaten whites are folded in at the end and never cooked at any stage. The finished cake is served straight from the cold, so the whites go to the table raw. This is the standard Salmonella exposure, and it falls hardest on children, older guests and anyone pregnant or immune-compromised.
- The yolk mixture is not a safe custard eitherThe yolk mixture is not a reliable safeguard either -- The syrup and two yolks are stirred over water only "until thick and smooth", and thickening tells you nothing about whether the mixture reached a pasteurising temperature; without a thermometer it may or may not have. Nothing later in the method brings it up.
- Twelve hours in the iceboxAn ice-cooled box ran warmer and less steadily than a modern refrigerator, commonly in the upper 40s to low 50s F. Holding a raw-egg mixture that long at that temperature gives considerably less protection than modern refrigeration.
- If you want the dessertPineapple icebox cake is worth making, but use a current recipe built on pasteurised eggs or a cooked-to-temperature base rather than adapting this one.
- Lady fingers"Split lady fingers" means the biscuits halved lengthwise and used to line the pan. Both the crisp savoiardi type and softer sponge fingers went under the name in American books of this period; the drier biscuit absorbs more moisture from the filling.
- Crushed pineappleCanned crushed pineapple, drained hard — the fruit was tinned and widely available by the time this book was collected. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which would slacken any gelatine-set version of this dessert, though there is no gelatine here.
- YieldThe recipe does not name a pan size; a loaf pan would give roughly six to eight slices. "Garnish" is left entirely unspecified.
Icebox cakes belong to the decades when mechanical and ice refrigeration became normal in American kitchens and cooks found they could set a dessert with cold instead of an oven. The form — a pan lined with purchased biscuits, filled with a creamed butter-and-sugar mixture, and left overnight — turns up widely in community cookbooks of the kind, and it asked for no baking skill and no oven heat in summer. Canned crushed pineapple was cheap, sweet and uniform.