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French Chef (Whites eggs pint thick cream)
Whites 2 eggs ⅓ pint thick cream 1/3 cup milk ½ cup cooked prunes, cut in pieces Crême aux Fruits 1 tablespoon granulated gelatine ¼ box gelatine or 1/4 cup cold water 1/4 cup scalded milk 1/2 cup sugar 1/3 cup chopped figs Soak gelatine in cold water, dissolve in scalded milk, and add sugar. Strain in pan set in ice-water, stir constantly, and when it begins to thicken add whites of eggs beaten stiff, cream (diluted with milk and beaten), prunes, and figs. Mould and chill.
This is a moulded gelatine cream from the era when cold desserts were assembled over ice rather than cooked. The structure is sound, but the method sets raw egg white into a chilled mould and never brings it to any temperature at all.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe only heat in the recipe is the scalded milk used to dissolve the gelatine, and it is strained and cooled over ice-water before the beaten whites go in. The whites are eaten raw, held for hours at refrigerator temperature in a sugary dairy medium — the standard Salmonella Enteritidis exposure that modern egg handling guidance exists to prevent. A current recipe for a fruit cream or Bavarian, using pasteurised whites or a cooked custard base, should be used instead.
- Nothing here fixes itGelatine does not pasteurise, chilling does not pasteurise, and the small amount of scalded milk is diluted and cooled long before the whites are added. There is no adjustment to the timings or temperatures in this recipe that would make it safe, which is why none is offered.
- The ingredient list is scrambledThe page has been run together from a broken setting: the title Crême aux Fruits sits in the middle of the ingredients, and "14 box gelatine" is almost certainly a broken "1/4 box gelatine". It most likely stands as an alternative to the tablespoon of granulated gelatine rather than as an additional quantity.
- ⅓ pint thick creamThe printed page was checked, and the cream measure is the ⅓ pint our text now gives. That amount sets properly with a tablespoon of gelatine and half a cup of sugar, and leaves the prunes and figs in evidence.
- "Thick cream" and "box gelatine"Thick cream in books of this period means the richer cream, in modern terms roughly heavy cream; here it is diluted with milk before beating. A box of gelatine was the retail carton of the period, and a quarter box was commonly reckoned as about a tablespoon of granulated gelatine — which is why the two measures appear together in the list.
- Prunes and figsBoth were common storecupboard dried fruits rather than luxuries. Dried figs were sold whole and pressed, which is why they need chopping here.
Crème aux fruits is simply "cream with fruit." Moulded creams of this kind depended on packaged gelatine, sold ready-measured by the box, which made chilled desserts — Bavarian creams, charlottes, Spanish creams, fruit creams like this one — far easier to attempt at home than when a cook had to boil down calves' feet or buy isinglass. Setting stiffly beaten raw whites into such moulds to lighten them was common at the time and persisted in print for decades; it is the one element of the technique that has not survived modern food-safety practice.