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Lemon Cheese
Soak one and a half ounces of French leaf gelatine until dissolved; pour over it a full pint of boiling water, then add half a pound of sugar, half a tea-spoonful of citric acid, and the juice of two lemons. Leave until nearly cold. Beat the whites of two eggs well, and whisk together with the other ingredients to a stiff froth.
A whipped lemon jelly of the kind Victorian cooks called a "cheese" or a "sponge" — but the egg white here is folded into a mixture that is already nearly cold, and it is never cooked at any stage.
- Why it fails: uncooked egg whiteThe gelatine liquid is deliberately left until nearly cold before the raw whites go in, so nothing in the finished dish ever reaches a temperature that would deal with Salmonella. Whisking raw white into a cold mixture and leaving it to set is exactly the situation modern food-safety advice singles out. If you want a lemon sponge, use a current recipe written around pasteurised egg white.
- French leaf gelatineNineteenth-century leaf gelatine was not standardised, and "French leaf" appears to describe a trade type rather than a defined strength. An ounce and a half of it cannot be assumed interchangeable with an ounce and a half of modern bronze, silver, gold or platinum leaf, which differ in setting strength. This alone makes the quantity unreliable.
- Soak, then boiling water"Soak until dissolved" most likely means soak in cold water until the leaves are limp and swollen; the boiling water that follows is what actually dissolves them. The wording reads oddly to a modern eye, and the recipe does not say what becomes of the soaking water.
- Citric acidSold loose by grocers and chemists as "lemon salt", and still available as a powder. Half a teaspoonful is added here on top of the juice of two lemons.
- Half a pound of sugarAbout 225 g, dissolved into one pint of liquid: a heavily sweetened jelly by modern standards.
"Lemon cheese" in British usage most often means lemon curd — butter, eggs, sugar and lemon cooked to a thick spread; the name "cheese" is usually explained by its being potted and kept like one, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. Here the name is used more loosely, for a moulded lemon confection built on gelatine and whipped egg white, a family of dishes listed in Victorian books under names such as lemon sponge and lemon snow. Commercial leaf gelatine had become considerably cheaper by the later nineteenth century: what had once required calves' feet boiled down for hours could be bought ready made, and jellied and whipped sweets became correspondingly easier to produce. Citric acid crystals, sold as lemon salt, belong to the same economy — a way of getting reliable sharpness when fresh fruit was seasonal and variable.