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Strawberry Sponge
One quart of strawberries, half cupful of cold water, one cupful of sugar, one-third of a box of gelatine, whites of three eggs. Mash the berries through a sieve. Mix the sugar with the juice and dissolved gelatine and stir until all are dissolved. Stand in a pan of ice and when it begins to thicken, fold in the stiffly beaten whites, stirring until the mixture begins to thicken. Turn into a mould and set on the ice until stiff. Serve with whipped cream or cream and sugar.
This is a gelatine sponge: fruit purée set with gelatine and lightened with beaten egg white. Nothing in it is ever heated, and that is the problem.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe whites of three eggs are folded in raw and the sponge is set cold on ice. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would destroy Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside intact, clean shell eggs. Sugar and gelatine do not inactivate it, and the dessert then sits for hours at refrigerator temperature. Use a current recipe if you want a strawberry sponge.
- Why period cooks were not worriedEgg-white whips, snows, sponges and uncooked meringues run all through nineteenth-century books. The specific risk of internally contaminated shell eggs was not recognised until industrial-scale flock production in the later twentieth century, so the technique was recorded without comment for generations.
- "One-third of a box of gelatine"Package sizes were not standard across brands in this period, and the weight a "box" stood for varied. The quantity here is genuinely ambiguous and cannot be converted with confidence.
- "Dissolved gelatine"The recipe assumes you already know to soften the granules and melt them; the softening step is omitted. The half cupful of cold water is almost certainly the soaking liquid rather than an addition to the fruit, though the recipe does not say so.
- A quart of strawberriesRoughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of whole berries, yielding something under two cupfuls of sieved puree. Sieving leaves the seeds behind.
- "Stand in a pan of ice"The domestic equivalent of an ice bath, used because iceboxes could not chill a bowl quickly. The timing hinge is real regardless of method: the gelatine must be thickened to the consistency of raw egg white before the whites go in, or they float and the sponge sets in two layers.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; with the whites folded in, something around a quart of finished sponge, enough for perhaps six moulded servings.
"Sponge" in a book of this vintage means a specific thing: a jellied puree beaten or folded with egg white until it doubles and turns opaque, the cold-kitchen cousin of a souffle. The family runs from earlier whips, snows and creams, and such recipes became commoner in American cookbooks around the turn of the century, when granulated gelatine was sold ready-portioned in boxes -- which is how this recipe reckons it, by fraction of a box rather than by weight. Before that, cooks either bought sheet gelatine or isinglass or made their own jelly stock by boiling calves' feet, a slower business that made moulded desserts a more ambitious undertaking.