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Lemon Floating Island
Take half a dozen fresh eggs, separate the whites and the yolks; beat the whites to a solid froth, sweeten them, and flavour with two or three drops of the essence of lemon. Beat the yolks, mix them with a pint and a half of milk, flavour strongly with lemon, and stir the custard over a gentle fire until it thickens, but it must not boil. Take it off the fire, and when nearly cool, add very gradually a table-spoonful of lemon-juice. Pour it into a glass dish, and pile the whites upon it. Garnish according to taste. A small piece of red-currant jelly placed here and there is an improvement, or half of the froth may be thickly coloured with cochineal. Time, a few minutes to thicken the custard. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
The custard here is cooked, but the meringue is not: the sweetened whites are beaten, flavoured and piled straight onto the dish. That is the part that no longer meets modern practice, and it is not a matter of adjusting a time or a temperature.
- The whites are never cookedSix raw egg whites are beaten, sweetened and served as they are. Raw white carries a Salmonella risk, and nothing in the method — no poaching in the milk, no hot syrup, no oven — brings them anywhere near a safe temperature. A current recipe, using poached meringue or pasteurised whites, should be used instead.
- The custard is borderline too"Stir over a gentle fire until it thickens, but it must not boil" is sound technique for a stirred custard, but the book gives no temperature and no visual endpoint beyond thickening. A yolk custard needs to be taken to a measured temperature to be both safe and smooth; "a few minutes" tells you nothing about either.
- CochinealThe colouring called for is genuine cochineal, an insect-derived dye still permitted as carmine but a known allergen for a small number of people. Nineteenth-century colourings sold to households were also liable to adulteration, and food-analysis reports of the period took an interest in them.
- Essence of lemonVictorian essence of lemon was an alcoholic tincture of lemon peel oil, and its strength is not comparable with modern extract, still less with zest. "Two or three drops" and "flavour strongly" cannot be read straight across to anything on a supermarket shelf.
- The pintA pint and a half in an English book of this date is imperial: 30 fl oz, about 850 ml, not the 24 fl oz an American reader would assume.
- Cost and yield"Probable cost, 1s." is a shilling. The stated yield, four or five, is realistic for the quantity of custard.
Floating island is the English name for what French cookery calls œufs à la neige — snow eggs — a dish built on the simplest possible division of an egg: yolks into custard, whites into froth, the froth set adrift on the custard. It appears in English books from the eighteenth century onward and had become a standard supper-table sweet by the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary, valued because it looked elaborate in a glass dish while costing a shilling and using nothing but eggs, milk, sugar and flavouring. The French tradition generally poaches the whites in the hot milk before the custard is made; a good many English versions, including this one, simply piled the raw froth on top. The lemon flavouring and the currant-jelly garnish are period taste in miniature: sharp flavour, and colour placed on a pale dish for effect rather than for eating.