Line a glass dish with stale sponge-cake. Sprinkle with wine. Make a boiled custard. Use 4 yolks of eggs and flavor with rose-water. Beat the whites with pulverized sugar and flavor to taste. Pour the custard over the cake and place the stiffly beaten whites on top. Put on the ice and serve very cold.
A trifle-adjacent dessert built in three stages: soaked cake, stirred custard, meringue. The original assumes you know how to make a boiled custard, so the proportions and the temperature are the parts worth spelling out.
- The hinge: the custard must not boil"Boiled custard" is a period name for a stirred custard cooked over hot water, not a custard actually brought to a boil. Four yolks will thicken about a pint of milk at around 170-180F; much above that the eggs curdle and no amount of whisking brings it back.
- Quantities the recipe omitsFigure roughly 1 pint milk, 4 yolks, 1/4 cup sugar and a pinch of salt for the custard, and 2-3 tablespoons of sugar for the whites. The wine sprinkling is a few tablespoons of sherry, Madeira or sweet white wine, enough to dampen the cake without flooding the dish.
- Stale sponge-cake is deliberateDay-old or two-day-old cake absorbs wine and custard without collapsing into paste. A fresh, moist sponge will go slack. Split the cake into fingers or slices about half an inch thick to line the bowl.
- Rose-waterThe strength of rose-water varied a good deal, and period rose-water may well have been weaker than the concentrated food-grade rose water sold now. Start with half a teaspoon in the custard, taste, and add more; too much reads as soap.
- "Put on the ice"Most likely the icebox, though the phrase could also mean standing the dish directly on ice. Either way, chill covered at least two hours so the cake softens through and the custard sets to a pouring-cream thickness.
- The uncooked whitesThe meringue here is never heated, so it is raw egg white. Anyone cooking for small children, pregnant women, the elderly or the immune-compromised should use pasteurized whites, or poach spoonfuls of the meringue in barely simmering milk and float them on top, as classic oeufs à la neige does.
- Meringue that holdsBeat the whites to soft peaks before adding the pulverized (superfine) sugar a spoonful at a time. Untreated raw meringue weeps within a few hours, so pile it on shortly before serving rather than at assembly.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; at these proportions a quart-sized glass dish would serve about six. Glass matters only in that the layers are the point of the dish.
"Float" was a dessert name in use across the later nineteenth century in America for anything with a cloud of beaten white sitting on a soft base, and this one sits between two older forms: the French île flottante or oeufs à la neige, in which meringue floats on custard, and the English trifle, in which wine-soaked cake sits beneath it. Calling it French rather than a trifle is a nod to the custard-and-meringue pairing and to the rose-water, a flavoring that had been standard in European sweets since the medieval period and had by this date largely been displaced by vanilla extract in American kitchens. The book's conceit is one dish a day, each pinned to a country, so the labels tell you less about the dish's origin than about how an American cook of the period sorted her repertoire: rose-water and custard read as French.