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Whips
1/2 box or 2 tablespoons gelatine. 1/2 cup cold water. 1 cup boiling water. 1/2 cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla Whites of 2 eggs Candied Cherries Soak the gelatine in the cold water; pour over it the boiling water; add the sugar and the vanilla. When this begins to congeal add the unbeaten whites of eggs; beat until white and frothy; fill glasses and place a candied cherry on top of each. Serve with cream or with custard sauce.
This is a gelatine whip of the sort that filled dessert glasses in the early twentieth century, and it depends entirely on raw egg white that is never heated. That is the reason it cannot be made as printed.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe unbeaten whites go into gelatine that is already cooling and beginning to set, so nothing in the finished dish reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. The boiling water is spent warming and dissolving the gelatine before the eggs are added, and the mixture is chilled from there. Anyone wanting a whip today should follow a current recipe built around pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue.
- The ingredient list is incompleteAs printed, the page gives sugar, vanilla, two whites and cherries, but no quantity for the gelatine, the cold soaking water or the boiling water. The lines carrying those amounts are simply absent from the page as it survives. There is no honest way to reconstruct the ratio from what remains.
- Gelatine of the periodGranulated gelatine then was bloomed in cold water for several minutes before hot liquid was added — the same two-stage method the recipe assumes. Older recipes often called for sheet or shredded gelatine as well, which behaves differently by weight, another reason the missing quantity matters.
- "Begins to congeal"This is the hinge of the technique: the syrup must be cool enough to hold air but still fluid. Add the whites too early and the mixture stays liquid; too late and it sets into rubbery lumps that will not beat smooth.
- Custard sauceThe suggested accompaniment is a stirred boiled custard, thin enough to pour — not a baked custard. It is one of two options the recipe offers alongside plain cream, both adding a richness a whip has none of.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Two whites and half a cup of sugar, whipped to volume, would fill something on the order of four to six small stemmed glasses, but this is an estimate only.
A "whip" was one of a family of late-Victorian and Edwardian desserts — snows, sponges, whips, spanish creams — that all rest on the same trick: beating air into a setting gelatine so that a few pennies' worth of ingredients fill a tall glass. Commercially packaged granulated gelatine made these possible in ordinary households, where earlier cooks had to boil calves' feet or isinglass to get the same effect. Whips were prized for looking expensive and costing almost nothing, and cookbooks of the period print them by the dozen, distinguished mainly by flavouring and garnish; the candied cherry on top is pure period styling, the same finish applied to charlottes, moulded creams and ice-cream coupes. The loose-leaf format of this book was itself a selling point of the era, letting a cook remove a single page to the kitchen table.