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Strawberry Whip (Cup strawberries tablespoon)
1 cup strawberries 1 tablespoon lemon juice Hull and wash the strawberries, add sugar and lemon juice. Beat the whites of eggs until stiff, add other ingredients, and serve ice-cold in frappé glasses.
The instructions omit the two ingredients that do the most work here, and the finished whip is never heated at any point. Both matter.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe whites are beaten and folded into fruit, then served ice-cold. Nothing in the method brings them to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, which can be present in and on shell eggs; chilling only slows bacterial growth. Uncooked shell egg is the reason this dish cannot be recommended as written, particularly for children, older adults, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised.
- The ingredient list is incompleteOnly strawberries and lemon juice are quantified. The number of egg whites and the amount of sugar appear in the method but never in the list, so there is no way to reproduce the author's proportions.
- Sugar and berriesThe sugar is left unquantified, as the eggs are. Older strawberry varieties may well have been more variable in size and acidity than modern cultivars, but the recipe gives no reason for the omission. A cup of hulled berries today is roughly 5 oz.
- Frappé glassesSmall stemmed glasses, holding perhaps 4 to 6 oz, used for iced and semi-frozen desserts. Any small stemmed or coupe glass is the equivalent; the point is a cold vessel and a small portion, since an uncooked whip collapses as it warms.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a fruit whip or fool, one written with modern egg safety in mind.
Fruit "whips" belong to a long English line of fools, snows and creams in which raw fruit is lightened with beaten egg white or whipped cream and eaten cold, a family that appears in printed cookery from at least the sixteenth century onward. By the time Lowney's Cook Book was published, the chafing dish had become a familiar fixture of a particular kind of American entertaining: informal late suppers made at the table, and cookbooks devoted whole chapters to what could be produced with one flame and no kitchen. A strawberry whip fit that setting neatly because it needed no flame whatever, only fruit, sugar, a lemon, a whisk and ice. The recipes themselves also suggest an easy reliance on raw egg white as a lightening agent, which turns up in everything from these whips to the era's whiskey sours and albumen frostings, decades before Salmonella in shell eggs became a recognized public health concern.