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Prune Whip
1 pound prunes Sugar to taste Whites of 2 eggs 1 tablespoon pulverized sugar Wash the prunes thoroughly and soak them over night. In the morning cook until tender in the water in which they have soaked; remove the stones; chop fine and sweeten to taste. Beat the eggs; add the powdered sugar, then the prunes. Beat thoroughly and stand on the ice to chill. Serve in individual glasses or paper cases with whipped cream or custard sauce.
This version of prune whip is never cooked. The beaten whites go straight into the fruit and the whole thing is chilled and served, which is where it fails by current standards.
- Raw egg white, uncooked and unheatedThe whites here are beaten raw, mixed with the stewed prunes and chilled on ice. The recipe gives no step that heats the egg to a safe temperature: the prunes may still be warm when added, but nothing ensures they are hot enough for long enough, so Salmonella present in or on the shell is neither killed nor inhibited. Other whips of the period were baked in a dish set in hot water; this one is not.
- Chilling is not a controlStanding the mixture on the ice slows bacterial growth but does not eliminate it, and a sweetened fruit purée aerated with protein is a comfortable medium.
- Who it was served toPrune whip turns up in the nursery and invalid cookery of the period, served to children, convalescents and the elderly — groups for whom a raw-egg dessert carries the greatest consequence. That is the specific reason this recipe should be set aside rather than adapted.
- If you want prune whipUse a current recipe: either a baked whip, or one built on pasteurized egg white. Do not reconstruct this one with adjusted timings.
- Reading the original"Pulverized sugar" is what we would call powdered or confectioners' sugar. A pound of dried prunes is roughly two and a half cups before soaking.
- Paper casesThese are the pleated paper cups still sold for cupcakes and petits fours, used here as individual serving vessels rather than for baking.
Prune whip belongs to a family of late nineteenth-century "whips" and "snows" — fruit pulp lightened with beaten egg white — that filled the space between a jelly and a soufflé. Prunes were the workhorse of the group: cheap, shelf-stable, available all winter, and credited with a mild laxative virtue that made the dish a fixture of sickroom and school cookery well into the twentieth century. A pound of dried fruit and two egg whites made a company dessert. The baked version, set in a pan of hot water and browned in the oven, appears alongside the uncooked one; which you got depended on the writer, not on any settled sense that one was safer than the other.