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Fruit Whip
1 1 Egg White 4 Tablespoons sugar 4 Tablespoons Corn Syrup 1/2 Box Strawberries or 1/2 Can Canned Berries 1 Teaspoon Lemon Juice Beat egg till stiff, then add sugar and syrup gradually. Beat constantly. Add fruit and flavoring. Other fruits may be used. Apples, grated pineapple, other berries, plums, etc.
This is an uncooked meringue: raw egg white beaten with cold sugar and corn syrup, then folded with fruit. Nothing in the method brings the egg to a safe temperature.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe sugar and corn syrup here are added cold and beaten in, so the white stays raw from start to finish. Egg whites can carry Salmonella, which is not destroyed by whipping, by sugar, or by the acid in a teaspoon of lemon juice.
- Not the same as an Italian meringueA cooked meringue works because syrup is boiled to roughly 240F and poured into the whites while beating, which heats them as it stabilises them. This recipe skips that entirely, so it carries none of that protection.
- Who it was served toLight egg-white desserts of this type often appear in period invalid and nursery cookery, offered to children, the elderly and convalescents. Those are exactly the groups for whom a raw-egg dessert carries the highest risk, which is worth knowing before treating the recipe as harmless.
- Holding timeThe recipe gives no instruction about when to serve it. If it is left to stand at room temperature, raw egg and cut fruit together compound the problem rather than easing it.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe built on pasteurised egg white or aquafaba, which gives the same volume without the raw-egg question. Do not adapt the method above.
- On the measurements, for readingA "box" of strawberries in this period was a market basket, commonly a pint or a quart; a pint of berries runs to roughly 12 oz. The half can of canned berries is similarly loose, as can sizes were not standardised.
The Bride's Cook Book belongs to a large family of early twentieth-century volumes assembled for young women setting up house. Fruit whips, snows and sponges are often linked to the older English "fool" and "snow" tradition, in which beaten egg white carried fruit pulp into something airy without cream, ice or a stove. Corn syrup appearing beside the sugar points to an American recipe of the commercial-glucose era, from about the turn of the twentieth century onward. The closing line, that other fruits may be used, is characteristic of these books, which taught a method and left the household to supply whatever fruit was to hand.