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French Cream Filling
3/4 cup thick cream 1/4 cup milk 1/4 cup powdered sugar White one egg 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Dilute cream with milk and beat until stiff, using Dover egg -beater . Add sugar, white of egg beaten until stiff, and vanilla.
A whipped-cream cake filling from the era before refrigeration was universal and before anyone worried about what was in a raw egg. The technique is straightforward; the egg white is the problem.
- Uncooked egg whiteThe white is beaten stiff and folded in raw, and the filling is never heated at any point. Raw shell egg carries a risk of Salmonella in both white and yolk, and a cream filling sitting between cake layers at room temperature is a good growth medium rather than a barrier. Use a current recipe if you want a stabilised whipped filling.
- It is not stored safely eitherThe recipe gives no instruction to chill the filled cake. Even setting the egg aside, sweetened cream held above refrigeration temperature is not something to serve later in the day.
- "Thick cream"The book's term for the richer of its two creams, i.e. what would now be sold as heavy or double cream. Period cream was variable in fat, and the quarter cup of milk may simply be there to thin cream stiffer than a modern carton.
- Dover egg-beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater sold by the Dover Stamping Company and common enough in American kitchens that the brand name was often used generically. The instruction tells you nothing about the recipe beyond "whip it by hand."
- The trailing line"1 cup thick cream, 1/3 cup sugar" at the end is a stray pair of quantities, most likely the opening ingredients of the following recipe rather than a continuation of the method above. What was done with them is not on this page.
The name "French" here appears to signal richness and lightness rather than any specific French original; American cookbooks of the period used it loosely for preparations built on whipped cream or beaten egg white. The recipe also records something about period dairy: cream was variable enough that a cook might dilute it with milk before whipping, which is nearly the reverse of the problem a modern kitchen has.