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Newport Whips
For Newport whips stand I glass of red raspberry jelly in a warm place where it will gradually soften to a thick syrup. Beat the whites of 2 eggs until foamy, add to the softened jelly, then gradually pour in 1 cupful of very heavy cream.
Stir in 1/2 cupful of sifted powdered sugar (less if the jelly is very sweet) and beat with a churn or dover beater. Lift off the froth as it rises, and place on a sieve to drain. When no more froth appears divide the liquid among the proper number of glasses and top each with a portion of the froth. Serve icy cold.
The method is sound old-fashioned whip-making, but the structure of the dish depends entirely on raw egg white that is never heated at any stage.
- Why it failsThe whites go in raw, and the mixture is beaten, drained on a sieve and served cold. There is no step at any point that brings the eggs above room heat, so nothing in the process addresses Salmonella in shell eggs. If you want a raspberry whip, use a current recipe written around pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue.
- The warm place compounds itThe standing time compounds it -- The jelly is softened in a warm place before the eggs go in, and the beaten mixture then sits while the froth is lifted off and drained, giving an egg-and-cream mixture an extended hold at room temperature. The instruction assumes a cold larder and same-day service.
- "1 glass of jelly"This means a tumbler or jelly glass of the day, roughly 6 to 8 fluid ounces, but the original is genuinely imprecise and the sugar is adjusted by taste against it in any case.
- Dover beaterThe Dover was the standard American hand-crank rotary eggbeater, patented in 1870 and widely sold thereafter. "Churn" here most likely means a small dasher churn used as a whipping device rather than a butter churn's worth of cream.
- Very heavy creamThis meant gravity-separated cream, richer and less standardised than supermarket heavy cream, though the exact fat content varied.
- The froth-and-liquid methodLifting the froth off in batches and draining it is the old syllabub technique: the drained liquid becomes the base in the glass and the lightened foam is spooned on top, giving two layers from one mixture rather than a single uniform mousse.
Whips of this kind descend directly from the English syllabub, a wine-and-cream froth skimmed off as it rose and drained on a sieve, which was already old by the eighteenth century; the raspberry-jelly version is a late, thriftier American cousin in which fruit jelly replaces the wine and does the flavoring and coloring at once. The Newport name attached to a good many turn-of-the-century dishes, borrowing the cachet of the Rhode Island resort where the wealthy summered, and it rarely indicates any documented local origin. The economy of the thing is in the method: two egg whites, a cup of cream, a glass of jelly and some powdered sugar stretch by aeration into the proper number of glasses. No cooking at all was a further economy, since nothing had to be fired up in a summer kitchen.