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Floating Island (One-half package gelatine one)
One-half package gelatine, one pint of water; soak twenty minutes; add two cups of sugar; set on the stove and let it come to a boil; when nearly cold add the whites of four eggs beaten stiff, the juice and rind of two lemons and pour into a mould; turn over the form. Make a custard of the yolks of four eggs, a quart of milk and a small tablespoon of corn starch; sweeten to taste.
This is a gelatine-and-meringue "island" set in a mould and turned out onto a pouring custard, rather than the poached meringue most cooks expect. As written it cannot be recommended, and the reason is structural rather than incidental.
- The egg whites are never cookedThe sugar syrup is boiled but then cooled to "nearly cold" before the stiff whites go in, so the whites are only chilled and set, never heated. Four raw whites folded into a dessert that then sits at refrigerator temperature is exactly the situation in which Salmonella in shell eggs is a documented risk, and the acid from two lemons does nothing to address it. Use a current recipe for a set meringue dessert instead.
- "One-half package gelatine" is not a fixed amountPeriod gelatine packages were not standardised the way a modern quarter-ounce envelope is, so half a package is genuinely ambiguous. Anyone reading old gelatine recipes should treat the quantity as unknown rather than converting it.
- Two cups of sugarThat is a very heavy hand for a pint of liquid. Nineteenth-century gelatine desserts were sweet by design.
- "Turn over the form"This means unmould the set gelatine onto a serving dish, then flood the custard around it. The "island" is the white mould; the custard is the sea.
- The custard sideFour yolks, a quart of milk and a small tablespoon of cornstarch makes a thin pouring custard, with a little starch alongside the egg. The recipe gives no method, but a custard of this kind would be cooked and stirred over heat, unlike the white portion.
Floating island is related to the French œufs à la neige, in which meringue is poached in milk and set adrift on a thin custard, though early English 'floating islands' were often built quite differently. The name appears in English collections by the mid-eighteenth century. What marks this version as of its own moment is the gelatine: packaged granular gelatine became widely available in American kitchens from around 1890, and cooks used it to remake older desserts as moulded set pieces that could be turned out whole. The result here keeps the yolk custard beneath but replaces the poached snow with a lemon-flavoured gelatine foam.