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Currant Jelly Whip
To the whites of 3 eggs add a tiny pinch of salt and beat until foamy. Add 3 tablespoonfuls of sifted powdered sugar and beat again until very stiff and glossy. Now add, a teaspoonful at a time, 2/3 of a glass of currant jelly, continuing to beat until the mass is perfectly light and well mixed. Pile in a dish or in small glasses and send to the table.
A three-ingredient uncooked meringue of the sort that filled the dessert pages of thrift cookbooks. The problem is the one thing the recipe never does: apply heat.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe whites are beaten and served straight from the bowl. There is no cooking step, no hot syrup poured in, and nothing in the mixture reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, which can be present inside intact, clean shell eggs.
- The jelly does not make it safeCurrant jelly is acidic and sugary, but it is beaten in a teaspoon at a time into a large volume of foam. The finished whip is not an environment that reliably kills pathogens, and it is served without any heat step.
- Who is most at riskUncooked-egg desserts are specifically advised against for young children, older adults, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised — which is much of the audience a family dessert is aimed at.
- If you want this dessertUse a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue method, rather than adapting this one.
- On the vocabulary, for reading purposes"Powdered sugar" in books of this era generally means finely ground sugar rather than the modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar, and "2/3 of a glass" is an unhelpfully loose measure — a tumbler of the period ran roughly 6 to 8 fluid ounces, which puts the intended quantity somewhere between a half and two-thirds of a cup of jelly.
Fruit whips were a standard economy dessert in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: egg whites, a little sugar and whatever preserve was in the pantry, beaten into a volume far larger than the sum of its parts. Currant jelly was a natural partner because red and black currants are high enough in pectin to set firmly without added pectin and were a fixture of home preserving in both Britain and America. The appeal to a low-cost cookbook is obvious — no cream, no gelatin, no fuel, and a few eggs stretched into a dish for several people. The same formula appears under names like prune whip and apple snow, and it survived in print well into the era of home refrigeration, before the food-safety advice on uncooked eggs that would eventually retire it.