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Peach Fluff
1 cup sugar 1 cup thick cream 2 egg-whites 4 cups sliced peaches Add half the sugar to the cream, stir until the sugar is dissolved, and then add the whites of the eggs beaten stiff. Place the sliced peaches in a dish, sprinkle them with the remainder of the sugar, pour on the cream mixture, and serve at once. The success of this depends upon its being thoroughly chilled when served. The cream, eggs and fruit should be placed on ice at least two hours before the dish is to be prepared, and the latter should be sent to the table as quickly as possible, being kept in the ice-box until needed. Apple fluff or berry fluff may be made in the same way.
A cold uncooked fruit-and-cream dish from the era when raw egg white was folded into desserts as a matter of course. The problem is structural: nothing in it is ever heated.
- Why it fails todayThe stiffly beaten whites are folded in raw and the dish goes straight to the table. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and inside the egg, and beating and chilling do nothing to it. Use a current recipe if you want a fruit fluff.
- Chilling is not a controlThe recipe's instruction to keep everything on ice for two hours is given for the sake of the finished dish, not its safety. Refrigeration slows bacterial growth; it does not reduce a load already present.
- Dairy of the period"Thick cream" here means heavy cream, roughly 36-40 percent fat, and in 1929 it was often unpasteurised farm cream. That assumption sits behind the whole recipe.
- The vessels named"On ice" and "the ice-box" mean a chest cooled by a block of ice, typically holding around 45-50F -- warmer and less steady than a modern refrigerator.
- The variationsThe apple and berry versions named at the end share the same defect, since the change is only in the fruit.