egg recipesSeptember’s spinach scare and the new warnings on Salinas Valley, Calif., lettuce are reminders to home cooks to keep food safety in mind.

It’s an issue that I’ve been watching since I noted last spring that a few recipes, such as those calling for raw eggs, are outdated.

Specifically, I’ve found recipes for chocolate mousse, tiramisu, and other desserts that called for uncooked eggs. In a tiramisu recipe, the eggs were separated: First, the yolks were beaten with the sugar and then mascarpone and set aside; then, the whites were beaten until stiff and folded into the mascarpone mixture. The lovely looking dessert was never cooked.

As I began perusing recipes, I saw that many older cookbooks use uncooked eggs in dishes such as sabayon, mousse, and other desserts. And even some newer cookbooks — a few from 2005 and 2006, for example — also have a recipe or two using raw eggs. Often, these dishes are historic or old-world recipes.