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Floating Island (Take the yolks of seven eggs)
Take the yolks of seven eggs to one quart of milk, one cupful of sugar, a little salt, and flavor with lemon. Beat all together, and set in a kettle of water other than the kettle it is boiled in. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and pile in heaps on top of the boiled milk, after it has been put in the float glasses. This will make twelve glasses full. They look very pretty set in a circle round a bouquet of flowers, in the center or at each end of the table.
This is a boiled custard with raw meringue spooned on top. The custard itself is a standard stirred custard, but the whites as directed are never cooked at all, and that is where the recipe fails.
- The raw whites are the problemThe whites are beaten stiff and piled on custard that has already been poured into individual glasses, so they are never heated. Even hot custard poured beneath them does not carry enough heat into a stiff foam to bring it near the 160F needed to deal with Salmonella, and the meringue is served as-is. Use a current floating island recipe, in which the meringues are poached in milk or baked, or a cooked (Italian or Swiss) meringue.
- "Float glasses"Evidently small serving glasses used for this dessert; the recipe gives no description of them. Twelve of them from a quart of milk means roughly 2 1/2 to 3 fl oz of custard each.
- "Set in a kettle of water other than the kettle it is boiled in"Awkwardly worded, but it means a double boiler: the custard goes in an inner vessel set over simmering water in the outer one, never over direct heat.
- "Flavor with lemon"Unspecified; lemon extract is one likely reading, since acid from juice added before cooking can curdle a milk custard.
- Yolk proportionSeven yolks to a quart of milk makes a rich, spoon-coating custard. There is no thickener, so it sets by egg alone and stays pourable.
- YieldTwelve small glasses, as stated, which is closer to twelve tastes than twelve desserts by modern portion sizes.
Floating island — oeufs à la neige in French, "snow eggs" in older English books — is a long-established form of the egg-and-milk dessert, and by the late nineteenth century so familiar that compilers like this one felt no need to explain it; the English name has covered other constructions too, layered assemblies of cream, jelly and syllabub among them. The name is literal: islands of white foam floating on a pale sea of custard. What dates this version is not the dish but the presentation. American household books of the period were preoccupied with the look of the table, and the instruction to set the glasses in a circle around a bouquet of flowers belongs to the era of the elaborately dressed dinner table, when a dessert's job was partly decorative. The casual treatment of the whites also marks the period: raw beaten egg white appeared without comment in frostings, drinks and desserts throughout these books, decades before anyone connected it to foodborne illness.