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Moonshine
This dessert combines a pretty appearance with palatable flavor, and is a convenient substitute for ice-cream. Beat the whites of six eggs in a broad plate to a very stiff froth, then add gradually six table-spoons powdered sugar (to make it thicker use more sugar up to a pint), beating for not less than thirty minutes, and then beat in about one heaping table-spoon of preserved peaches cut in tiny bits (or some use one cup jelly), and set on ice until thoroughly chilled. In serving, pour in each saucer some rich cream sweetened and flavored with vanilla, and on the cream place a liberal portion of the moonshine. This quantity is enough for seven or eight persons. Mrs. H. C. Meredith,
A raw-egg-white confection of the sort that filled the "creams and custards" chapters before mechanical refrigeration and before anyone had heard of Salmonella. The technique is sound meringue practice; the problem is that nothing here is ever cooked.
- Why this one failsSix egg whites are beaten, chilled and served with no heat applied at any stage, and the finished dish then sits at table temperature over a pool of cream. Raw whites can carry Salmonella enteritidis, which is not destroyed by sugar, cold or beating. Use a current recipe for an uncooked meringue dessert, which will call for whites brought to temperature or otherwise treated.
- The cream is raw tooThe "rich cream" poured into each saucer is unheated, sweetened and flavoured only at the moment of serving. In 1880s household use it would generally have been unpasteurised, a second uncontrolled ingredient in the same bowl.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term means sugar ground fine at home or bought as a fine crystal, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar of today. The two behave differently in a meringue: modern confectioners' sugar carries roughly 3 percent starch and will slightly dull the gloss.
- "Up to a pint"The sugar instruction slides from six tablespoons to a pint by volume, more than a fivefold range and a genuinely ambiguous direction. At the upper end the mixture stops being a foam and becomes closer to an uncooked royal icing.
- Thirty minutes of beatingThat figure assumes hand beating with a whisk in a broad shallow plate, as the recipe specifies. It is a measure of labour, not of what the whites require.
- Preserved peachesPeaches put up in syrup, chopped small. The alternative given, a cup of jelly, means a firm fruit jelly beaten in to colour and flavour the whole mass.
- "Set on ice"Iceboxes of the period held perhaps 45 to 50F, warmer than a modern refrigerator. The dish was meant to be cold enough to feel like ice cream, which the note about being a "convenient substitute" makes explicit.
"Moonshine" here has nothing to do with illicit spirits; it is one of a family of nineteenth-century names, alongside snow and whip, for a sweetened beaten egg white served cold. The name is often said to point at the appearance rather than the taste, a pale luminous heap sitting in a saucer of cream. Its presence in The Dixie Cook Book is a good indicator of how ice cream stood in the American household of the 1880s: desirable, familiar enough to be the standard of comparison, but requiring ice and a freezer, so that a hostess wanting the effect without the apparatus reached for eggs instead. The attribution to Mrs. H. C. Meredith is typical of the book's method, which gathered contributions from named subscribers rather than a single author.