Home › Creams and Custards › Snow Custard
Snow Custard
Half a package of Coxe's gelatine, three eggs, two cups of sugar, juice of one lemon; soak the gelatine one hour in a tea-cup of cold water, add one pint boiling water, stir until thoroughly dissolved, add two-thirds of the sugar and the lemon juice; beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and when the gelatine is quite cold, whip it into the whites, a spoonful at a time, from half an hour to an hour. Whip steadily and evenly, and when all is stiff, pour in a mold, or in a dozen egg-glasses previously wet with cold water, and set in a cold place. In four or five hours turn into a glass dish. Make a custard of one and one-half pints milk, yolks of eggs, and remainder of the sugar, flavor with vanilla, and when the meringue or snow-balls are turned out of the mold, pour this around the base. -Mrs Gov. Thayer, Wyoming Territory.
This is a snow pudding — whipped gelatine set in a mold and ringed with a boiled custard. The custard is cooked; the white "snow" is not, and that is where the recipe fails for a modern kitchen.
- The whites are never heatedThe gelatine is deliberately cooled until "quite cold" before the beaten whites go in, so the egg white in the molded snow is raw from start to finish, and it then sits four or five hours in a mold before serving. Raw shell egg carries a Salmonella risk that no amount of whipping addresses. If you want a snow pudding, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue.
- The chilling makes it worse, not betterFour or five hours in a "cold place" meant a cellar or icebox in 1877, not a 40F refrigerator. A sweetened, aerated egg-white foam held for hours at cellar temperature is well above what modern food-safety guidance allows for a raw-egg preparation, and the dessert is served without any further heating.
- Who it is served toEven where raw-egg desserts are tolerated, they are not for children, older adults, pregnant women, or anyone immunocompromised — which is most of the audience a large molded party dessert is aimed at.
- "Half a package of Coxe's gelatine"Coxe's Sparkling Gelatine came in a paper package generally reckoned at about an ounce of granulated gelatine, so half a package is roughly half an ounce. Modern envelopes are a quarter ounce each, but the strength of 19th-century gelatine is not directly comparable to today's, so the original quantity is genuinely approximate.
- "Egg-glasses"Small footed glasses for serving soft-boiled eggs, holding a few tablespoons each; a dozen of them tells you the intended yield, twelve small individual servings, with the pint and a half of custard poured round.
- The half-hour of whippingThe long, steady beating is not fussiness. Adding cold gelatine a spoonful at a time to stiff whites, and continuing until the whole mass sets, is what gives the pudding its volume and lets it hold a mold without a hot syrup. It is also why an electric mixer changes the timing entirely from the "half an hour to an hour" given here.
Snow pudding, snow custard, and "floating island" belong to a family of 19th-century desserts that used the two halves of an egg separately — whites for the airy white mass, yolks for the pale custard poured round its base. What made this version easier for an ordinary household was commercial granulated gelatine: before firms such as Coxe's sold it by the packet, a cook produced gelatine herself by simmering calves' feet or isinglass for hours. The attribution is characteristic of Buckeye Cookery, which prints recipes under the names of the wives of governors across the states and territories; Wyoming was still a territory when the book appeared in 1877, and "Mrs. Gov. Thayer" would have been the wife of John M. Thayer, its territorial governor in the mid-1870s.