Ice Pudding
Put one half package of gelatine in a cup of cold water; let it stand one or two hours, then add one pint boiling water, two cups sugar, the juice of two lemons. Beat the whites of three eggs to a stiff froth and after straining the gelatine, sugar and lemons, add the beaten whites of the eggs, beat it well into the mixture, wet cups and pour it in. Serve with boiled custard.
This is a lemon snow pudding: gelatine, sugar and lemon whipped with egg white until it sets pale and foamy, then unmolded and flooded with custard sauce. Two things need translating — the gelatine measure and the raw whites.
- Half a package of gelatineNineteenth-century gelatine came in boxes of varying weight, so this is genuinely ambiguous. For the roughly three cups of liquid here, two standard envelopes (about ½ oz / 14 g total) gives a set firm enough to unmold; one envelope gives a soft spoonable pudding.
- Soaking timeThe one-to-two-hour soak belongs to the coarse sheet and granulated gelatines of the period. Modern granulated gelatine blooms fully in cold water in five to ten minutes, and leaf gelatine in less.
- Raw egg whitesThe pint of boiling water is diluted by the cold soaking water and cooled further by the sugar and lemon juice, so the whites are never brought near a safe temperature. Use pasteurized whites in carton form, or pasteurized-in-shell eggs, particularly if serving children, older people or anyone pregnant.
- The hinge: temperature when you beatThe strained gelatine mixture must be chilled to the consistency of raw egg white — thickened but not set — before the whites go in. Beat it warm and the foam collapses into a clear layer with a scum of froth on top; beat it too late and you get lumps of jelly in the foam.
- SugarTwo cups to three cups of liquid is very sweet by current taste, and the custard sauce adds more. One cup to one and a quarter is enough, and the lemon reads better for it.
- StrainingStrain the gelatine, sugar and lemon together before the whites go in, as directed. It catches undissolved gelatine grains and lemon pulp, both of which show badly in a white pudding.
- Wet cupsRinsing the molds with cold water and leaving them wet is what lets the pudding slide out. Individual teacups or ramekins work; so does a single 1½-quart mold, which will need longer to set — four hours at least, overnight is better.
- Boiled custardA stirred custard sauce (crème anglaise), not a baked one — milk, egg yolks and sugar cooked over low heat until it coats a spoon, around 175–180°F. It uses the three yolks left from the whites.
- YieldServes six generously, eight in small cups.
The name sits oddly with the method: this pudding is never frozen, though "Ice Pudding" in period cookbooks normally denotes a frozen dessert. The same dish appears in American cookbooks of the era as snow pudding or lemon sponge. Its existence depends on packaged gelatine, which became a cheap grocery staple in the last decades of the nineteenth century and swept away the older method of boiling calves' feet for hours to make a jelly stock. That change put molded and whipped desserts within reach of ordinary households. Here the cold white pudding is served in a pool of boiled custard, the sauce supplying the richness that the gelatine mixture itself entirely lacks.