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Whipped Cream (For Almond Sponge or Other)
For Almond Sponge or Other Beverage.
Eggs, whites of, 3; Cream, 1 pint.
Whip eggs to a foam, add the cream, and whip again to a foam, and keep on ice.
This is a soda-fountain topping built on raw, unpasteurized egg white that is never heated at any stage and is then held for hours over ice. That combination is the problem, and it is not one that adjusted quantities or timings can fix.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe whites go straight from the shell into cream and are served as they are. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella Enteritidis internally, and nothing in this procedure brings the mixture anywhere near the 160F at which those bacteria are reliably killed. A modern recipe using pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue base should be used instead.
- Extended holding at fountain temperature"Keep on ice" is the recipe's only storage instruction, and ice-cooled storage of the period would not have held a reliable refrigeration temperature. A protein-rich, low-acid, low-sugar mixture kept cool but not cold, and held over a working day, is a poor candidate for extended storage.
- Scale of the batchA pint of cream plus three whites makes more topping than a household is likely to use at one sitting, so a home cook would be holding the surplus, which compounds the first two problems rather than reducing them.
- What "almond sponge" wasThe recipe offers this cream for an "Almond Sponge or Other Beverage," so the sponge was a drink rather than a cake, and this aerated cream was intended to crown it. The precise formula of the drink is not given here.
- "Whip to a foam"The instruction stops well short of stiff peaks. Note also the order of work: the whites are beaten first, the cream is then added, and the whole is whipped a second time.
- Cream then and nowCream of the era was unhomogenized and not standardised as modern heavy cream is, so the egg white would have contributed usefully to volume and stability. Omitting the whites will not reproduce the original texture.
Soda-fountain manuals like this one were trade books, written for the dispenser behind the marble counter rather than the cook at home, and they read accordingly: ingredients listed as a dispensary formula with quantities after the name, instructions clipped to a single line. Aerated creams of this kind belonged to the era when the fountain was a serious commercial kitchen in miniature, turning out egg phosphates, malted milks, ice-cream sodas and egg lemonades, some of which — the egg drinks by definition — used raw egg as a cheap source of body and foam. Almond flavoring at the fountain is often said to have come from orgeat or a bitter-almond-scented syrup, part of a long American fondness for almond sweets traceable back through nineteenth-century confectionery. The casual use of uncooked egg here is entirely of its period: the link between shell eggs and Salmonella Enteritidis was not established until the late twentieth century, and until then a raw white in a drink was thought wholesome, even strengthening.