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Strawberry Whip (Cups strawberries egg whites)
2 cups strawberries 2 egg whites 1 cup powdered sugar 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon lemon juice Crush the berries; add sugar and lemon juice. Beat eggs until stiff, and continue beating while adding strawberry mixture. Serve with soft custard or beaten cream. Vanilla Charlotte Russe No. I 2 cups cream cup powdered sugar 3 egg whites 1 teaspoon vanilla Beat cream until stiff; add sugar, flavoring, and egg whites, baten until stiff. Line a mold with slices of sponge cake or lady fingers; fill with mixture. Chill and serve.
A fruit whip of this type is built entirely on raw egg white, which is never heated at any stage. That is the one thing a modern cook has to reckon with before anything else.
- Uncooked egg whiteThe whites are beaten raw and served raw, with no cooking, no hot syrup and no baking. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella, and nothing in this method brings them to a temperature that would deal with it. A current recipe built on pasteurized whites should be used instead.
- The custard served with itThe suggested accompaniment, soft custard, is a stirred egg custard. It is cooked, but gently, and no temperature is given here; how far cooks of the period carried it is not recorded.
- The salt is out of scaleA full teaspoon of salt against two cups of berries and a cup of sugar looks out of scale for a fruit whip; many books of this era call for only a few grains or a saltspoonful, so the quantity may well be a misprint rather than an instruction.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period powdered sugar generally meant finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold today.
- BerriesThe recipe calls for two cups of berries before crushing, something under a pound of fruit. Market strawberries of the period were generally smaller and sharper than most supermarket fruit today.
- YieldAs written the mixture would fill perhaps four to six small glasses. Whips of this kind lose volume fairly quickly and were best made shortly before serving.
Fruit whips were a fixture of American dessert chapters from the 1880s through the 1920s: raw fruit pulp, sugar and beaten white, with no gelatine, no cooking and no equipment beyond a bowl and a wire whisk. They are often grouped with the older English syllabubs and snow creams, lightened for a period that had the rotary egg beater and was fond of desserts that looked substantial and weighed almost nothing. Lowney's book, issued by a chocolate manufacturer, carries a broad dessert section well beyond its own product, and a strawberry whip is exactly the kind of quick warm-weather sweet such books offered a cook who did not want to light the oven. Gelatine desserts and commercial whipped toppings later took over the same place at the table.