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Strawberry Float
One pint of strawberries, two cupfuls of pulverized sugar, two eggs, one pint of milk or cream. Crush the berries. Beat the whites of two eggs very stiff and gently add one and one-half cups of sugar, then gradually add the crushed berries, beating well all the while until all is a stiff pile of rosy cream. Pile in the center of a glass dish and set on ice to cool.
This is an uncooked egg-white foam, and that is the problem with it: nothing in the method ever reaches a temperature that would make raw whites safe. The notes below explain the specific failure and clear up the period vocabulary.
- Why it failsThe whites are beaten stiff, folded with sugar and fruit, and set on ice — there is no cooking step at any point. Raw shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella, and chilling only slows bacterial growth rather than eliminating it. Use a current recipe built around pasteurized egg product if you want a dessert of this kind.
- Pulverized sugarThis is the period name for finely ground sugar, closest to what is now sold as powdered or confectioners' sugar, though period pulverized sugar generally lacked the cornstarch modern brands include. Granulated sugar is coarser and would dissolve less readily into a cold foam.
- The float itself"Float" refers to the assembly, not a step: the pint of milk or cream is poured into the dish and the pink foam heaped in the center so it appears to float. The recipe never says so outright, which is why the milk seems to go unused.
- The missing half-cupTwo cupfuls of sugar are listed but only one and one-half are accounted for in the method. What became of the remaining half-cup is not stated.
Floats belong to a family of late-nineteenth-century "snow" and "sponge" desserts that depended on nothing but a whisk, sugar and long arm work: strawberry snow, apple snow, prune whip, all of them raw fruit purée driven into beaten whites until it stood up on its own. They multiplied in American household cookery of the 1880s and 1890s in part because rotary and wire egg beaters had become cheap and common, making a stiff meringue a matter of minutes rather than a kitchen ordeal. The same rosy foam was served heaped on milk as a dish in its own right, spooned over plain cake, or set beside stewed fruit, and its category depended entirely on what it was put next to. Ice, likewise, was a household commodity by this date.