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Strawberries with Whipped Cream
Prepare in layers as above, cover with one pint of cream, whites of three eggs and a tea-cup of powdered sugar, whipped together and flavored with strawberry juice.
A short entry that leans on the preceding recipe in the book for its structure, and on raw egg whites for its body. The egg is the problem.
- Raw egg whites, never heatedThe whites of three eggs are folded into cream and sugar and served cold, so nothing in the dish ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Whatever the state of the egg supply when this was written, it is not a control anyone can rely on now. Use a current recipe for a strawberry cream if you want to make something like this.
- "Prepare in layers as above"The instruction is meaningless on its own — it refers to a recipe immediately preceding it in the book. Without that page you are missing half the method.
- A pint of creamTwo US cups. The book means raw or lightly separated cream, which need not match modern heavy cream in fat content; today's ultra-pasteurised cream is generally reckoned to whip more slowly and hold less air.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually means granulated sugar crushed fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. The two behave differently in a whipped mixture, the modern product having some stabilising effect.
- Why the egg white was there at allBeaten whites were used as an extender and stabiliser for whipped cream before commercial gelatine and stabilised creams were common. They add volume and help the foam stand.
- Flavored with strawberry juicePresumably juice from the berries, though the recipe does not say where it comes from. Adding liquid to whipped cream slackens it, which may be part of why the original leans on beaten whites for structure.
The Dixie Cook-Book, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox and issued in Atlanta in the 1880s, was a Southern reworking of her earlier Buckeye Cookery. Layering berries with sugar and letting them stand is a long-familiar treatment — the sugar draws out juice and turns hard field berries into something soft and syrupy — and the whipped topping recalls the eighteenth-century syllabub, where cream, sugar and sometimes egg white were beaten to a froth and heaped over fruit or wine. The recipe's brevity, and its reliance on "as above," is common in compiled books of the period, which often assumed the reader was working through the chapter in order rather than opening to a single page.