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Fruit Whip
1 cup fruit pulp. 2 tablespoons powdered sugar White of 1 egg Beat white of egg until stiff, add pulp, sugar and lemon juice to taste. Beat until stiff. Serve plain.
A one-line dessert of the kind that filled the back pages of utility cookbooks: raw beaten egg white lightened with fruit pulp, never heated at any point. That last fact is the problem.
- Raw egg white, no cooking stepThe white is beaten and served as-is. Nothing in the method brings the egg above room temperature, so any Salmonella present in or on a shell egg survives into the finished dish. Current guidance treats uncooked shell egg as a hazard, particularly for children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised.
- Held and served coldRaw foam, no acid step -- Once beaten, the whip stands while it is dished and served; the recipe gives no chilling or holding instruction at all. A sugared, aerated raw-egg foam is not a safe thing to hold, and there is no acid step strong enough to compensate — "lemon juice to taste" is not a measured acidification. Use a current fruit-whip or fruit-fool recipe instead.
- The fruit quantity is missingThe ingredient list gives only sugar and one egg white; "add pulp" is never quantified, and no particular fruit is named anywhere in the recipe as printed. Even setting the egg aside, it cannot be followed as written.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period the term generally meant sugar ground finer than granulated; it is not necessarily identical to what is now sold as confectioners' or icing sugar, which is cut with a little starch. A finer sugar dissolves more readily in a foam than granulated.
- YieldNo yield is stated. One egg white with fruit pulp would make roughly a single small serving, perhaps two if the fruit is generous.
Fruit whips belong to a large family of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century "light" desserts — whips, fools, snows, floats — built on the fact that a beaten egg white can carry several times its volume in air and be flavoured with almost anything sweet. They were valued in sickroom and hospital cookery because they were bulky, easy to swallow and made from a single egg, and books of this sort often printed them alongside junkets and blancmanges. Apple snow, the best-known version, appears in English recipe books by the eighteenth century. The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and distributed free to policyholders in very large numbers over the first half of the twentieth century; its recipes are short, cheap and deliberately plain. The unquestioned use of raw egg is a fair marker of the period: the link between shell eggs and salmonellosis was not understood in domestic cooking for decades after this book was in circulation.