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Creamed Walnuts
White 1 egg 1/2 tablespoon cold water ¾ teaspoon vanilla 1 lb. confectioners' sugar English walnuts Put egg, water, and vanilla in a bowl, and beat until well blended. Add sugar gradually until stiff enough to knead. Shape in balls, flatten, and place halves of walnuts opposite each other on each piece. Sometimes all the sugar will not be required. 1½ cups sugar
This is an uncooked fondant: raw egg white is bound with confectioners' sugar and eaten as-is. There is no step anywhere in the method that brings the egg to a safe temperature, which is why it should not be made from the text as given.
- The egg is never cookedAn Italian meringue cooks the white by pouring in syrup boiled to 235-240F, and a boiled fondant cooks its syrup to a similar stage with no egg in it; this recipe does neither. The white is beaten with cold water and vanilla, then kneaded with sugar and shaped, so any Salmonella present in the shell egg goes straight into the finished candy.
- Sugar is not a kill stepA very high sugar concentration lowers water activity and stops bacteria multiplying, but it does not reliably destroy what is already there. Salmonella survives for weeks, sometimes months, in dry high-sugar and high-fat confectionery, and low-moisture sweets have been implicated in real outbreaks.
- Room-temperature storage makes it worse, not betterTime at room temperature does nothing to sanitize the centers, and the sweets are handled bare-handed during shaping and again when served.
- Who it is worst forRaw-egg confectionery is worst for children, the elderly, the pregnant and the immunocompromised, the groups least able to tolerate a salmonellosis infection. That is reason enough not to reproduce it as printed.
- If you want creamed walnutsUse a current recipe for a cooked fondant or one built on pasteurized egg white; do not adapt the proportions here on the assumption that the only problem is the egg.
- The stray line at the endThe "1 1/2 cups sugar" printed after the method is not a second addition and does not correspond to any step; its origin on the page is unclear. The recipe itself calls for a pound of confectioners' sugar, added only until the paste is stiff enough to knead, and notes that not all of it may be needed.
Uncooked fondants of this sort were common in the confectionery chapters of American cookbooks around the turn of the century, when candy-making was taught as a home skill, cheap to practise and useful for church fairs and Christmas boxes. "Creamed" here appears to refer to the texture of the fondant center rather than to any dairy. English walnuts -- Juglans regia, as against the native black walnut -- were by then being grown in quantity in California, and they turn up often in candy and cake recipes of the period.