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Iced Raspberries
The raspberries must be large and good. Hull them, and examine the hollows carefully to see that there are no insects in them. Beat up the white of an egg with one wineglassful of water; dip the raspberries, one at a time, into the mixture of egg and water, and roll them in powdered sugar, one at a time, as they are taken out of the water, place them at short distances from each other on white paper, and leave them until they are quite dry, which will probably take six or seven hours. When dry, keep in a cool place till served for dessert.
A Victorian dessert conceit — fresh berries jacketed in a shell of egg white and sugar — that reads simply but depends on raw egg white that is never heated at any point. The notes below explain the units and the technique, and why this particular method is no longer sound.
- Why this one failsThe egg white is beaten with water, applied raw, and then left to air-dry for six or seven hours at room temperature before the berries are eaten uncooked. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the long ambient drying gives any organisms present a warm, moist, sugary surface to multiply on.
- Diluting the white makes it worseDiluting the white -- A wineglass of water thins the white considerably, which is presumably what allows a delicate coating rather than a gluey one; a thinner, wetter coat also means slower drying. Modern frosted-fruit recipes generally call for pasteurized egg white or meringue powder to avoid the raw-egg risk; use one of those instead.
- A wineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. It is not a modern stemmed wine glass, which would be three or four times as much.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period 'powdered sugar' usually meant finely ground granulated sugar, closer to what a British book calls caster sugar than to the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Confectioners' sugar tends to dissolve into the wet white and give a chalky film rather than a frosted, crystalline sparkle.
- "Examine the hollows"Not squeamishness. Raspberries are hollow-cored and can harbor small larvae; a brief soak in cold salted water is one way to float them out, though the recipe asks only that the hollows be examined.
- White paperPlain, uncoated paper would wick moisture from the underside of the berry; anything nonporous leaves a wet, sticky patch where the fruit sits.
Frosted or "iced" fruit — grapes, currants, cherries, raspberries — was a standard flourish of the late nineteenth-century dessert table, where the object was as much display as flavor: the sugar shell caught candlelight and made a bowl of ordinary summer fruit look jeweled. The word iced here carries its older sense of glazed or frosted, not chilled, the same sense preserved in "iced cake." Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel rather than chef at the Waldorf, and his 1896 book includes a good deal of this kind of dining-room work: garnishes, presentations, and finishing touches — though it ranges across the whole of cookery rather than confining itself to them. The recipe's warning about insects in the hulls suggests fruit that had not passed through any modern cleaning or grading.