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Strawberries and Whipped Cream
First remove the hulls from the strawberries and see that they are clean and sound. Arrange them in a glass dish, put a layer of powdered white sugar between the layers of strawberries and stand the dish away in a cool place. Take one pint of cream, add to it the whites of three eggs and four ounces of powdered white sugar, whip this mixture until it froths, then allow it to stand for a minute or so; remove the froth as it forms and place it on a sieve standing over a basin, so that any cream that may drain from the sieve will not be wasted, then whip the cream again till it froths and remove the froth. Lay it on the sieve and proceed as before, from time to time turning back into the whipping-bowl any cream that has drained from the froth. Keep the whipped cream very cold and separate from the strawberries until a minute or so before serving, when it should be lightly laid round them, piling it as high as possible.
The dessert itself is simple, but the cream is built on raw egg white that is never heated at any point, and the whole thing is then held and served cold. That is the reason this one cannot be recommended as written.
- The raw egg white is the problemThree raw egg whites are whipped into a pint of cream and eaten uncooked. There is no heat step, no acid, and nothing else in the mixture that would reduce Salmonella in the whites. A current recipe for stabilized whipped cream should be used instead.
- The method prolongs the exposureThe froth is skimmed off in stages, drained on a sieve over a basin, and the drainings are returned to the bowl and re-whipped. The recipe gives no timing, but that repeated handling stretches the process out, and a raw-egg mixture should not be held unchilled for long.
- "Keep very cold" was the whole safety marginThe only precaution the recipe offers is to keep the cream cold and separate from the berries until a minute or so before serving. Cold slows bacterial growth but does not undo contamination already present.
- Powdered sugar is not confectioners' sugarIn this period "powdered white sugar" generally meant granulated sugar ground fine, without the cornstarch found in modern confectioners' sugar. The modern product is lighter and slightly starchy, so it behaves differently in cream.
- The measuresA pint of cream is 2 cups. Four ounces of sugar is a weight, roughly half a cup of granulated sugar, not a half cup by the measuring cup of the powdered product.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield and does not say how many strawberries to use; a pint of cream whipped to this volume, with berries, would plausibly serve six to eight.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf, but as ma tre d'h tel he was the public face of its dining rooms, and the 1896 Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf collected some nine hundred pages of what that kitchen turned out. Strawberries and cream needed no invention; what dates this version is the egg white beaten into the cream and the laborious skim-and-drain technique. Before mechanical refrigeration and stabilizers, egg white is often said to have helped whipped cream hold its height through service, and skimming the froth as it formed rather than whipping the whole bowl to stiffness is generally taken to have given a foam that could be piled up for the dining room. Both practices are now largely unfamiliar.