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Snow Eggs
Put over the fire a quart of rich milk, sweeten and flavor it with orangeflower water. Separate the yolks and whites of six fresh eggs, then beat [202] the whites to a stiff froth. Drop one spoonful at a time into the boiling milk; turn as quickly as possible, and lift out of the milk with a skimmer; place them on a sieve; beat up the yolks and stir them into the milk; let them have one boil up and put them in a glass dish. Arrange the whites around the edges, and serve cold. This is a pretty dish.
An old name for what most cooks now call floating island or œufs à la neige: poached meringue spooned over a thin stirred custard. The original assumes you know how a custard behaves, which is where the instructions need the most help.
- Do not let the custard boilThe direction to give the yolk mixture "one boil up" will scramble it. Stir the yolks into the hot milk off the heat, return it to low heat and cook to 170-175F, when it coats a spoon; strain at once into the serving dish.
- Poach, do not boil, the whitesMilk at a full boil tears the meringue and makes it tough. Hold the milk at 180F or so, a bare shiver with no rolling bubbles, and give each spoonful about 2 minutes total, turning once.
- Sweetening is left to youNo sugar quantity is given. For a quart of milk, 1/2 to 2/3 cup in the custard is usual, plus 2 tablespoons beaten into the whites once they hold soft peaks, which stabilises the meringue for poaching.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, and still potent; 1 to 2 teaspoons for a quart is enough. Anything more turns soapy. Vanilla or a strip of lemon zest steeped in the milk works if you have none.
- "Rich milk"The milk of the period was unhomogenised, and "rich" here most likely means milk with a good proportion of cream in it. Use whole milk with a few tablespoons of cream, or three parts whole milk to one part half-and-half.
- EquipmentA wide shallow pan gives room to poach three or four spoonfuls at once. Drain the cooked whites on a clean tea towel rather than a bare sieve, which marks them.
- Yield and servingSix eggs and a quart of milk serve six to eight. Chill it well before serving; the meringues tend to weep if they sit on the custard overnight, so float them shortly before serving.
Snow eggs is the plain English name for the French œufs à la neige, poached meringue on custard, a dish present in British and American cookery from the eighteenth century onward and common on nineteenth-century dessert tables under more than one name, snow eggs and floating island among them. The orange-flower water points to an older tradition: distilled floral waters were widely used as sweet flavourings in English kitchens before vanilla extract became cheap and commonplace. The closing line, "This is a pretty dish," is the whole argument for it: a dessert built from a quart of milk and six eggs that looked like considerably more.