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Fig Puff
1 cup cream
2 tablespoons powdered sugar
1 egg-white
Chopped figs
1 tablespoon grapefruit mar- Maraschino cherries malade
Shredded almonds
Whip the cream until thick. Beat the egg-white until stiff, then combine with the cream and add the sugar and marmalade. Stir chopped figs into the mixture until it becomes very thick. Pack in long-stemmed glasses. This may be garnished by sprinkling the top with macaroon crums. Arrange a half maraschino cherry with radiating strips of almonds in the center of each. PUDDINGS
This is a whipped-cream fool of the sort that filled the gelatin-and-cream chapter of Edwardian cookbooks, but it folds an uncooked egg white into a dessert that is never heated at any stage.
- The raw egg whiteThe white is beaten stiff and folded into cold cream, then served straight from the glass. Nothing in the method brings it above room temperature, so any Salmonella present in or on the shell egg survives into the finished dish. This is the reason the recipe cannot be recommended as written; if you want a fig fool, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or on cream alone.
- Not a case of long-ago squeamishnessRaw-egg desserts were commonplace in cookbooks of this period. Modern distribution, and the recognition of egg-borne Salmonella enteritidis as a distinct problem from the 1980s onward, changed the calculation rather than the recipe.
- Holding time makes it worseHolding time -- the mixture is packed into individual glasses in advance rather than served from a bowl, and a soft, sugared, aerated dairy mixture left to stand at room temperature is a good growth medium; the egg white is not the only ingredient at issue once it warms.
- Grapefruit marmaladeA grapefruit preserve, still made by specialty producers. It is doing flavour work here, not setting work — the body comes entirely from the whipped cream and the figs.
- "Chopped figs" is unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity, and does not say whether the figs are fresh or dried; the instruction is only to stir them in until the mixture is "very thick." Any reconstruction has to guess.
- Macaroon crumsAlmond macaroons, dried hard and crushed — the crisp counterweight to the cream. Amaretti are the closest thing on a shop shelf.
Fig Puff belongs to the family of fruit-and-whipped-cream desserts: fruit stirred through cream, needing no oven and no setting time. The distinguishing marks of its date are the long-stemmed glasses, the maraschino cherry and the radiating spokes of shredded almond — a decorated top on individual glass servings. Dried figs, imported in pressed blocks chiefly from Smyrna, were a staple winter sweetmeat in American pantries and turn up throughout period cookbooks in puddings, fillings and confections, so a recipe like this used what was already on the shelf. Grapefruit was still a comparatively novel Florida crop in this era, and preserves made from it would have read as up to date.