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Floating Island
Into three-quarters of a pint of cream put sugar to make it very sweet, and the juice and rind of a lemon grated. Beat it for ten minutes. Cut French rolls into thin slices, and lay them on a round dish on the top of the cream. On this put a layer of apricot or currant jam, and some more slices of roll. Pile up on this, very high, a whip made of damson jam and the whites of four eggs. It should be rough to imitate a rock. Garnish with fruit or sweetmeats. Time, one hour and a half to prepare. Probable cost, 3s.
The obstacle here is the crowning whip: four egg whites beaten raw with jam, piled high and served without any cooking step at all. Notes below explain the problem and decode the period language.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe damson whip is the whole point of the dish and it is never brought to any temperature. Uncooked egg white can carry Salmonella, and nothing in the recipe — no sugar syrup, no oven, no poaching — reduces that risk. Current food-safety guidance is to use a recipe written for pasteurised egg product or a cooked meringue instead.
- Standing time makes it worseStanding time -- The recipe's hour and a half is preparation time; it does not say how long the finished dish stood before serving. A raw-egg foam over cream and soaked bread is nonetheless the kind of dish in which contamination can multiply at room temperature.
- Who it is worst forEven where raw egg is tolerated, it is not for pregnant women, infants, the elderly or anyone immunocompromised. A tall showpiece dessert on a shared table reaches all of them.
- Three-quarters of a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 15 fl oz — a little under two US cups of cream. As a British book, Cassell's measures in imperial pints, not the 16 oz American measure.
- French rollsNot baguette. A Victorian French roll was a small, light, soft-crumbed white roll, closer to a modern dinner roll, sliced thin so it would soak up the sweetened cream.
- Damson jamA dark, tart plum preserve, thicker and sharper than most supermarket plum jam.
- Probable cost, 3s.Three shillings was a substantial sum for a pudding. Cassell's gave a time and a probable cost for its recipes so a housekeeper could budget, and the figure marks this as a dish for company, not for Tuesday.
Floating island belongs to a family of English "rock" and "snow" desserts that ran from the eighteenth century through the Victorian table, and it is not the same thing as the French île flottante of poached meringue afloat on custard that later took the name. The English version, as here, is an architectural dessert: sweetened cream in a dish, layers of sliced roll and jam building an island out of the flood, and a stiff fruit whip heaped on top and deliberately roughened to suggest a crag. Recipes of this shape appear in English cookery books from at least the mid-1700s, and the taste for edible landscape — rocks, ruins, snowy hills — sat comfortably beside the sugar-paste and spun-sugar centrepieces of the same period. The recipe comes complete with a costing, so the reader could weigh the spectacle against the household books.