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Angel Food
Whites 3 eggs ½ cup powdered sugar 1 quart cream whip 1½ teaspoons vanilla Beat eggs until stiff, fold in sugar, cream whip, and flavoring; line a mould with Delmonico Ice Cream, fill with the mixture, cover, pack in salt and ice, and let stand two hours.
This is a frozen bombe: a mould lined with ice cream and filled with a sweetened whipped-cream-and-egg-white mixture. The filling is never cooked at any stage, which is where it runs into trouble.
- Raw whites, never heatedThe three egg whites are beaten stiff and folded straight into cream and sugar, then frozen. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it only halts growth, and the organism survives in a frozen bombe for the two hours in the ice cave and for as long afterwards as the dessert is kept. Nothing in this recipe heats the eggs at all, so nothing brings them to any temperature at which they could be considered pasteurised.
- Long holding at borderline temperatureAn ice-and-salt pack holds a mould in the region of 0 to 20F only while the ice lasts, and the surface of the filling passes slowly through the danger range while unmoulding and serving. A modern recipe for a frozen mousse or bombe uses either pasteurised whites or a hot sugar syrup beaten into the whites to make an Italian meringue; use a current recipe that does one of those.
- "Cream whip"The phrase appears to mean whipped cream rather than a proprietary product: cream beaten to soft peaks. Whether the quart is measured before or after whipping is not clear from the text, but either way the finished mixture is bulky and needs a large mould.
- Delmonico Ice CreamA cross-reference to another recipe elsewhere in the book, a vanilla ice cream whose name is generally taken from the New York restaurant. Such ice creams were typically custard-based and cooked, unlike the filling they are here asked to line.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period the term means sugar ground fine, which may be coarser than what is now sold as confectioners' or icing sugar. It dissolves into the cold mixture without heat.
- Packing in salt and iceThe mould is buried in a mixture of crushed ice and coarse salt in a tub or pail; period books give various proportions for this. The salt depresses the melting point of the ice and draws heat out of the mould; the two hours is a setting time, not a cooking time.
The name borrows from angel food cake, which by the 1890s was a fixture of American baking and had made "angel" shorthand for anything pale, airy and built on beaten egg whites. Here the idea is transferred to the freezer: a bombe of the sort French confectioners called bombe glac u00e9e, a shell of one frozen mixture lined into a mould and filled with a lighter one. Such moulded ices belonged to a moment when a household with a well-stocked ice house or a reliable ice delivery could turn out restaurant desserts without a mechanical freezer — the mould was packed in salt and ice and simply left alone. Recipes of this kind date from a period before Salmonella enteritidis in intact shell eggs was recognised as a problem at all.