Prune Whip
To the white of 1 egg beaten stiff, add 1 tablespoonful of pulverized sugar and 2 tablespoonfuls of stewed prunes, freed from the seed and chopped fine. Serve cold with cream.
A three-ingredient dessert built on raw, unbaked egg white. That single point is what stands between this version and a modern kitchen, and it is worth being precise about why.
- The egg is never cookedThe white is beaten, sweetened, folded with fruit and served cold. Nothing in the method brings it to the 160F at which Salmonella in a shell egg is reliably killed, and beating and chilling do neither. Many published prune whips of the same era were folded into a dish and baked, or set over hot water; this one is not, which is what puts it out of range.
- Cream on topThe serving cream is also uncooked, and depending on the period it would very likely have been unpasteurised as well. Poured over an uncooked egg foam it adds a second unpasteurised element to a dish that gets no heat at all.
- Who it was aimed atWhips of this kind turn up in the invalid-cookery and low-cost sections of household books, dishes intended for people eating light. Those are precisely the groups for whom a raw-egg dessert carries the most risk, and it is the reason a current recipe should be used instead.
- Pulverized sugarNot granulated but what a modern shelf calls confectioners' or powdered sugar, ground fine enough to dissolve into the foam.
- Two tablespoonfuls of prunesThe proportions are for a single small portion, one white to a spoon of sugar and two of fruit. Dried prunes of this era were usually dried with the stone still in, which is why the recipe bothers to say "freed from the seed"; most dried plums sold today are already pitted.
- YieldOne egg white beaten stiff makes roughly three-quarters of a cup to a cup of foam, so this is one serving, or two very small ones.
Prune whip belongs to a family of egg-white "whips" and "snows" that filled the cheap-dessert and invalid-cookery pages of American household books from the 1880s through the 1920s: a stiff white, a spoon of sugar, and whatever fruit pulp was in the house. Dried prunes earned their place in these books because they kept well, cost little, and carried a reputation as a mild laxative, which made them a fixture of sickroom diets and of institutional and boarding-house cooking. The appeal of the whip was arithmetic as much as flavour: a single egg and a spoonful of fruit, beaten, expand into something that looks like a full dish of dessert. Versions folded into a buttered dish and baked, sometimes over a pan of hot water, appear alongside uncooked ones like this in the same period.