Home › Cold Desserts › Raspberry Whip
Raspberry Whip
White 1 egg 1 cup powdered sugar Put ingredients in bowl and beat with wire whisk until stiff enough to hold in shape; about thirty minutes will be required for beating. Pile lightly on dish, chill, surround with lady fingers, and serve with Boiled Custard.
Strawberry Whip may be prepared in same way.
A one-line uncooked meringue from the era when a raw egg white was considered a neutral ingredient. It cannot be recommended today, but the text still rewards reading closely.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe white is beaten with sugar and served cold; nothing in the method brings it above room temperature. Raw shell eggs carry a Salmonella risk that sugar and thirty minutes of whisking do nothing to reduce, and the finished whip is then held chilled and eaten in quantity. If you want a raspberry whip, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue.
- The fruit is missing from the listAs printed here the ingredients are only egg white and sugar, though the recipe is titled for raspberries and offers a strawberry variant, so a quantity of fruit has plainly dropped out of this transcription. Without it the recipe reads as a plain uncooked meringue with a fruit name.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners'"Powdered sugar" may not mean confectioners' -- In cookbooks of this period powdered sugar generally denotes a finely ground grade coarser than the modern boxed confectioners' sugar, which is milled finer and usually cut with starch. A straight substitution may alter the texture.
- Thirty minutes with a whiskThe long beating time is a consequence of hand tools and a large quantity of sugar to be worked into a single white.
- Boiled CustardA stirred custard of milk, eggs or yolks and sugar, cooked gently until it coats a spoon. Unlike the whip, it is cooked.
- Lady fingersThe dry, finger-shaped sponge biscuits sold as ladyfingers or savoiardi. They are there as an edible border and as something to dip in the custard.
Fruit "whips" belong to a long line of English and American dishes built on beaten egg white and fruit pulp, descended from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century snows and fools and closely related to the apple snow that appears in many nineteenth-century American cookbooks. One egg, a cup of sugar, a handful of berries and labor produced a large, showy dish for a supper table. Such dishes also suit the summer economy of the period, when raspberries and strawberries came in briefly and abundantly and no oven need be lit. The confidence with which uncooked egg white is served here is characteristic of the time; the understanding that intact shell eggs can carry salmonella came only later.