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Banana Snow Whip
Slice 3 bananas, add 1/2 cup confectioner's sugar and 2 tbsp. lemon juice. Set in cold place at least one hour. Mash and beat until light. Add one cup cream whipped, stiffly beaten whites of 2 eggs and 1 cup of cocoanut. Pour into serving dish and sprinkle with cocoanut. Serve plain or with custard sauce.
— A Contributor
This is an uncooked whip: nothing in it ever meets heat. That is the problem, and it is the reason the recipe cannot be recommended as printed.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe stiffly beaten whites of two eggs go into the finished dessert and stay raw. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and within the egg itself, and beating does nothing to it. Cookbooks of this era used raw egg white freely in uncooked whips and snows, accepting a level of risk we no longer accept.
- Held cold, then held againHeld cold, then served -- The fruit sits an hour in a "cold place" — a cellar, larder or icebox, not a 40F refrigerator — and the whip is then assembled and served with no further chilling specified. A sweetened raw-egg and cream mixture standing at room temperature is a growth medium, and there is no cooking step anywhere to correct it.
- Who is most at riskUncooked egg white is a particular hazard for children, older adults, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised — precisely the mixed church-supper audience this book was written for. If you want a banana snow whip, use a current recipe built on pasteurized egg white or a whipped-cream base.
- "Cocoanut"The older spelling of coconut. By this period prepared shredded or desiccated coconut was sold in packets in the United States, though fresh grated coconut was still used; the recipe does not say which is meant, and either would work here.
- Confectioner's sugarThe same product as today's powdered or icing sugar. Being finely ground, it dissolves into raw fruit more readily than granulated sugar would.
- Custard sauceOffered as an option rather than a requirement ("Serve plain or with custard sauce"); a period custard sauce is a stirred custard cooked separately on the stove. It is the only heated element mentioned anywhere, and it does nothing to make the whip itself safe.
Fruit "whips" and "snows" — fruit pulp lightened with beaten egg white, sometimes with cream, served cold and unbaked — filled the pudding chapters of American community cookbooks from the 1880s onward, and banana versions arrived with the fruit itself. Fast steamship traffic from Central America and the Caribbean, together with rail distribution, made bananas an everyday grocery item in the northern United States by the 1890s, cheap enough that they turn up in church-supper books as freely as apples. The Philathea Cook Book belongs to the Baraca–Philathea movement, the Sunday-school class organization for young men (Baraca) and young women (Philathea) that spread widely through Protestant churches in the early twentieth century; its classes raised funds by collecting members' recipes, which likely explains why so many entries here are signed with a name or, as in this case, simply "A Contributor." The dish is characteristic of that context: no oven, no long labor, assembled ahead in the coolest corner of the house, and stretched with coconut to serve a crowd.