Dissolve ½ box of gelatin. Then cook 1 pint of milk; add 6 tablespoonfuls of sugar and stir in the yolks of 3 eggs. Mix all together with the gelatin and the whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth; add 1 teaspoonful of vanilla. Pour into a mold and place on ice. Serve with whipped cream.
This is the dessert usually called Spanish cream — a gelatin custard with beaten whites folded through, so that it separates into a clear jelly layer beneath and a foam above as it chills. The method as printed leaves the egg whites raw, which is where it fails for a modern kitchen.
- The whites are never cookedThe yolks go into hot milk and set as a thin custard, but the three whites are beaten to a froth and folded into a mixture that is then chilled, not heated. Nothing in the procedure brings them to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella. Use a current recipe for Spanish cream if you want to make this.
- No cooking temperature is given at all"Cook 1 pint of milk" and "stir in the yolks" tells you nothing about how far to take the custard. Period cookbooks commonly gave a coating-the-spoon test rather than a temperature; this text gives no target at all and no warning against curdling, so even the yolk portion is unverifiable as written.
- A box of gelatin is not a modern envelopeAround 1900 a box of granulated gelatin held roughly an ounce, so half a box is about ½ oz — very roughly two modern ¼-oz envelopes. Older gelatin also varied in strength between brands, so the quantity is genuinely approximate rather than convertible with confidence.
- "Dissolve" means soften firstGranulated gelatin of this era was soaked in cold water for several minutes, then dissolved in hot liquid. The recipe compresses both steps into one word and never says how much water, which is another gap the reader has to fill from elsewhere.
- "Place on ice" is the refrigeratorThe instruction refers to an icebox or a bowl set in a bath of ice. The dessert needs several hours of chilling to set, and it was expected to be held cold until served.
- YieldA pint of milk, three eggs and this much gelatin would roughly fill a quart mold; the number of servings depends on how it is portioned.
Spanish cream — sometimes Spanish jelly, and close kin to the French bavarois, though that is usually set with cream rather than beaten whites — was a fixture of English and American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the connection to Spain is decorative rather than documented. Packaged gelatin made such desserts easier: before it, cooks extracted their own from calves' feet or isinglass, a long job. Granulated gelatin sold by the box put a set custard within easier reach of an ordinary household, and books like this one leaned on it heavily, since a molded dessert could be made in the morning, left in the icebox and turned out at dinner without further attention. Folding beaten whites into the warm custard so that the mixture separates in the mold into jelly and foam is characteristic of the dish.