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Strawberry Filling
1 cup thick cream 1/3 cup sugar. 1/2 teaspoon vanilla White 1/3 egg 1/2 cup strawberries Beat cream until stiff, using Dover egg-beater, add sugar, white vanilla. of egg beaten until stiff, strawberries mashed, and of egg beaten until stiff, strawberries mashed, and vanilla. 1 cup sugar
A whipped-cream and fruit filling of a type common in turn-of-the-century American cake books. Read it as a historical document rather than a working recipe.
- The raw egg white is the problemThe beaten white is folded in and never heated at any stage, and the finished filling is spread between cake layers that are not baked afterwards. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella in the white as well as the yolk, and nothing in this method reduces it. Use a current recipe if you want a strawberry cream filling.
- It also sits warmIt may also sit warm -- a cream-and-raw-egg filling inside a layer cake is likely to be held at room temperature while the cake is cut and served, and warmth is the condition under which any bacteria present multiply fastest. That compounds the first problem rather than being separate from it.
- Dover egg-beaterThe hand-cranked rotary beater sold by the Dover Stamping Company of Boston, so ubiquitous that cookbooks of the period used the brand name as the generic term. Where a recipe of this era says "Dover egg-beater" it means simply a rotary beater rather than a whisk or a fork.
- "Cream" in this bookRecipes of this era calling for cream to be beaten stiff assume a rich cream, equivalent to what is now sold as heavy or double cream. Modern "light cream" and "half-and-half" will not whip, and single cream sold in Britain will not either.
- The sugar quantityA cup of sugar to a half cup of berries is far sweeter than modern palates expect from a cream filling; note that the text as printed never states how much cream to use. Undissolved sugar also tends to loosen whipped cream as it stands.
- Strawberries mashed, not slicedThe berries are crushed so their juice goes through the whole filling. That juice is also what makes such a filling weep and slump within an hour or two, so it is best assembled shortly before the cake is served.
Strawberry fillings like this one belong to the short list of things a nineteenth-century household could do with fresh berries in the few weeks they were available: eat them with cream, preserve them, or fold them into something for a cake. The cake chapters of American cooking-school books of the 1890s and 1900s carry long runs of these fillings and frostings, listed separately from the cakes so that any layer cake could be paired with any filling. The instruction to use a Dover egg-beater dates the text as clearly as any recipe could: the rotary beater turned whipping cream and beating whites from a task measured in arm-ache into a routine one, and Boston-published books named the Dover by brand for decades.