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Strawberry Fancy
Take a slice or two of plain sponge cake and cut out rounds two inches across. Then whip up in a basin the whites only of four eggs, coloring them with the thinner part of strawberry jam. As a rule this jam is not red enough, and you must add a little cochineal. Put the pink mixture in high piles on the cakes.
A wartime trifle of a dish — sponge rounds heaped with pink foam — but the foam is raw egg white that is never cooked, coloured and served as is.
- Why it fails: uncooked egg whiteThe four whites are whipped, tinted and piled on the cake with no heat at any stage, and the assembled dish is served as it stands. Raw shell egg carries a Salmonella risk, and egg white is not sterile; a modern version should use cooked meringue, a hot sugar syrup, or pasteurised whites.
- Nothing sets the foamBeyond the little sugar and fruit acid carried in the jam syrup, nothing is added to stabilise the whites: no beaten-in sugar, no gelatine. Barely sweetened whipped white is not a stable meringue and will begin to weep, so the "high piles" will not hold for long on the sponge.
- CochinealA red dye made from crushed cochineal scale insects, sold as a liquid colouring in bottles for kitchen use. It survives as carmine or E120, though modern cooks are more likely to use a commercial food colour.
- "The thinner part of strawberry jam"Most likely the thinner syrup that separates in a jar of old-fashioned preserve, rather than the set jelly or the whole berries; commercial jam today is homogenous and pectin-set, so there is little thin part to take.
- Sponge cake roundsPlain sponge here means a lean, eggy cake rather than a rich buttered layer cake, cut into rounds two inches across.
- ScaleFour whites make a great deal of foam for the slice or two of cake specified, so the proportions look generous.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in England in 1915 from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, with the proceeds going to relief work; that origin explains much of its character — the dishes built from whatever was already in the house. "Strawberry Fancy" takes its name from a period usage in which a "fancy" most often meant a small iced cake. The frank instruction to reach for cochineal because the jam is "not red enough" suggests a kitchen in which the pinkness of a dish was taken as part of its charm rather than something to apologise for.