Home › Left-Over Cake and Beverages › Berry Whip
Berry Whip
Fill a dish with slices of stale sponge-cake.
Sugar a quart of berries, mash them slightly, and pour over cake. Beat whites of three eggs stiff, add three tablespoonfuls powdered sugar, and beat in enough berries to flavor and color.
Heap on cake and serve with cream.
The whip is built on raw egg white that is never cooked, warmed, or acidified, and is then heaped on damp cake and served with cream. That is the problem with the recipe, and it is not one that a change of timing fixes.
- The meringue is never cookedThree whites are beaten with sugar and fruit and served as they are. Nothing in the method brings the egg above room temperature, so any Salmonella present in the shell egg is still present in the finished dish.
- Berries add moisture, not safetyMashed sugared berries are only mildly acidic, and diluted by sugar and egg white they cannot be relied on to make the foam safe. The cake is meant to soak, so the assembled dish is likely to wait before it is eaten.
- Who eats it mattersThe people most at risk from a salmonellosis infection are the young, the elderly and the unwell, and an uncooked-egg dessert offers no protection to any of them.
- Not comparable to raw egg in batterRaw egg in a cake or custard is heated later; here the egg foam is the dish. If you want a fruit-and-cream dessert on stale sponge-cake, use a current recipe built on whipped cream or a cooked custard.
- Reading the quantitiesA quart of berries is roughly 1 1/2 lb, or about four cups; "powdered sugar" in books of this period generally means finely ground white sugar rather than modern icing sugar with its cornstarch. The recipe gives no yield.
Whips, snows and fools all belong to a family of English desserts in which a beaten foam is piled over fruit or soaked cake, and the raw-egg-white "whip" appears often enough in nineteenth-century American household manuals to count as a familiar form. Stale sponge-cake was a recurring nuisance, and drenching it in mashed sugared berries disguised both the dryness and the age. The economy is real, and so is the period's blind spot. Recipes like this were written before eggs were widely understood as a vehicle for Salmonella, and before iceboxes could be relied on to hold a dessert cold while it waited for the table.