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Beaten Strawberries
Wash, hull and mash slightly two cupfuls of strawberries. Beat the whites of two eggs stiff, add two heaping tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar and the berries, and beat until very thick and stiff. Serve with angel food or delicate white cake.
A raw-egg-white foam of the sort that filled the sauce chapters of turn-of-the-century books. The technique is sound, but the dish is eaten entirely uncooked.
- The whites are never cookedNothing in this sauce reaches any temperature at all — the whites are beaten raw, folded with fruit and sugar, and served immediately. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella inside an intact, clean shell, and a cold uncooked foam neither kills it nor holds it in check. This is the reason for the caution; the risk is highest for children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised.
- Sugar does not make it safeTwo heaping tablespoonfuls of sugar in two cupfuls of berries and two whites is nowhere near enough to inhibit bacterial growth, and the mixture is not acidic enough to matter either. If you want a raw-fruit foam to serve with cake, use a current recipe written for the ingredients now available.
- Powdered sugarIn period American cookbooks "powdered sugar" generally meant sugar ground finer than granulated, not necessarily the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today; the terminology was not used consistently. A finer sugar dissolves more readily in a cold mixture, which may be why such recipes call for it.
- "Mash slightly"The instruction is presumably practical: whole berries weigh a foam down, while berries crushed to pulp release juice that can thin it. The original appears to be aiming for broken but still chunky fruit.
- Why it must be served at onceEven setting the egg aside, an unstabilised white foam with fruit juice in it will begin to weep and separate before long, so it is best served immediately rather than held in the refrigerator.
- YieldTwo cups of berries with two whites beaten stiff make a generous quantity of foam — enough sauce for several slices of cake.
Beaten fruit and egg-white sauces run through American and English cookery under a shelf of names — fruit snow, fruit whip — and they belong to a moment when a cook had both fresh eggs and a wire whisk and was willing to spend real time on the arm work. The pairing with angel food is at least suggestive of the date: angel food cake, which uses a dozen whites and no yolks, became a showpiece of American baking in the 1880s and 1890s, amid a broader taste for light, white, foam-based desserts. A sauce like this one made a virtue of the same qualities — pale, airy, barely sweetened, and constructed rather than cooked. It also reflects a strawberry season that was short and local; a book of this vintage assumes berries appear for a few weeks and are eaten hard while they last.