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Raspberry Float
Crush a pint of very ripe red raspberries with a gill of sugar; beat the whites of four eggs to a stiff froth and add gradually a gill of powdered sugar; press the raspberries through a fine strainer to avoid the seeds, and by degrees beat in the juice with the egg and sugar until so stiff that it stands in peaks.
The archaic measures here are easy enough to read, but the dish itself is a bowl of uncooked egg white that never sees heat at any point, which is why it cannot be recommended as written.
- Why this one failsThe entire body of the float is raw egg white beaten with fruit juice and sugar, with no cooking step of any kind. Nothing in the method brings the eggs anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella in shell eggs is reliably killed, and neither the sugar nor the mild acidity of raspberries has any meaningful antimicrobial effect at these proportions.
- Four whites, no dilutionFour raw whites for a pint of fruit is a large quantity of uncooked egg, and the mixture is beaten to hold air, so it is eaten as-is rather than folded into a cooked base. If you want a raspberry float or snow, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue.
- A gillHalf a cup, or four fluid ounces. The recipe calls for one gill of sugar to crush with the fruit and a second gill of powdered sugar for the whites.
- Powdered sugar in 1880s usageNot always modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. In books of this period "powdered" often means sugar ground finer than granulated, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar.
Floats, snows and "sponges" of this kind fill the fruit chapters of American cookbooks from the 1870s through the turn of the century, and they exist because a wire whisk and a few egg whites could turn a modest amount of summer fruit into a large, showy dish at almost no cost. The Dixie Cook Book compiled recipes gathered from Southern households in that tradition, where raspberries and other soft fruit were generally best used within a day or two of picking and did not travel or keep well. The related and better-documented ancestor is the English fruit fool and the "snow" creams of eighteenth-century receipt books, which likewise beat fruit pulp into whipped egg white or cream; the name "float" is often said to describe the frothed mass mounded up above the surface of a glass, though in period American books it most often attaches to a custard with a floating topping. It is worth noting how completely the assumption of same-hour service underlies dishes like this one, and how little of the period's raw-egg confectionery survives in modern kitchens for exactly that reason.