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Frosted Grapes
Take grapes of two colors, as red Tokays and white Muscadels, and pull the bunches apart into clusters of three or four grapes each. Prepare a platter with the sort of pulverized sugar known as fine granulated, and make it warm. Whip some white of eggs in a shallow bowl, dip the grapes in it, lay them on the sugar and sift more sugar on top. Lay them on sieves to dry.
The technique is sound confectionery practice, but the coating here is raw egg white that is never heated at any stage, and the finished grapes are eaten as they are.
- Why this fails todayThe whole point of the method is that the albumen dries in air rather than cooking, so the shell of sugar sets around uncooked egg white. Salmonella on or in shell eggs is not eliminated by drying on a sieve at room temperature, and a tray of fruit left out to dry for hours is a warm, moist surface for growth. A current recipe using pasteurized whites should be used instead.
- Compounding the riskGrapes are handled fruit with bloom and field soil on the skin, and the recipe has them dipped in a shared shallow bowl of raw white, which cross-contaminates the whole batch from any one egg or berry.
- Red Tokay and MuscadelTokay is a large red-pink table grape, long an important California shipping grape and now uncommon in supermarkets. "Muscadel" is an older form of muscatel; since the recipe calls for a white one, a white muscat such as Muscat of Alexandria is probably the nearest equivalent still sold.
- "Pulverized sugar known as fine granulated"Period sugar terms overlapped confusingly, and 'pulverized' could cover anything from a coarse ground sugar to a fine powder. Here the author pins it down by naming the grade sold as fine granulated -- roughly what is labelled caster or superfine now, not confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and would go pasty.
- Warming the sugarThe recipe gives no reason for warming the platter of sugar; the likely purpose is to keep it dry and free-running against the wet fruit, since damp sugar clumps and gives a lumpy, translucent coat rather than a frost.
- Drying on sievesSieves or wire racks let air reach the underside so the grapes do not sit in a wet patch and stick. The recipe does not say why the bunches are pulled into clusters of three or four.
Frosted or "sugared" fruit belongs to the ornamental dessert table, where it worked as ornament as much as confection: clusters of grapes with a rime of sugar were banked around ices, charlottes and set creams, or used to dress a cake stand, and the two contrasting colours called for here read, most likely, as a decorating instruction rather than a matter of flavour. Egg white brushed or dipped onto fruit and flowers, then sugared and air-dried, is a very old technique in European confectionery, generally traced to the candied and "conserved" flowers of early modern still-room work, and it survived into American pastry manuals because it required no sugar boiling and no equipment beyond a bowl, a platter and a sieve. Its appearance reflects a period when the visual set-piece was part of the pastry cook's job, and when the hazards of raw egg were simply not understood.