Home › The Principles of Cookery › LEMON SHRUB. (See ORANGE OR LEMON SHRUB.)
LEMON SHRUB. (See ORANGE OR LEMON SHRUB.)
LEMON SNOW (a pretty dish for a Juvenile party). Pour a pint of cold water over an ounce of isinglass or gelatine. Let it soak for half an hour, then put it in a saucepan over the fire, with three-quarters of a pound of loaf sugar and the thin rind and strained juice of two fresh lemons. Simmer gently, stirring it all the time, until the isinglass is dissolved; then pour it out, and put it aside until it is cold and beginning to set. Stir in the whites of three well-beaten eggs, and whisk all together briskly until it stiffens and assumes the appearance of snow, then pile it lightly in a glass dish, and make it look as rocky as possible. If the uniform whiteness is objected to, a tea-spoonful of the small comfits called hundreds and thousands may be strewn over the top just before serving, or half of the snow may be coloured with two or three drops of cochineal. Time to whisk the snow, half an hour. Probable cost, if made with gelatine, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
The header on this page is a cross-reference to Lemon Shrub, but the text printed beneath it is Lemon Snow, a whisked lemon jelly. It cannot be recommended as written, for one reason that overrides everything else.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe lemon-and-gelatine base is deliberately cooled to setting point before the three egg whites go in, and nothing afterwards raises the mixture above room temperature. The whites are eaten raw, and Salmonella on or in shell eggs is the specific risk. The book proposes this for a children's party, which is precisely the group — along with the elderly, pregnant and immunocompromised — for whom raw egg is least defensible. A current recipe using pasteurised whites or an aquafaba whip should be used instead.
- Half an hour of whisking at room temperatureThe mixture is whisked and then piled up and left standing at ambient temperature, and at no point is it cooked, so nothing in the method reduces the risk already carried by the raw whites.
- IsinglassA gelatine made from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, standard in Victorian jellies and still used to fine beer. It is not a supermarket item now; the recipe already allows ordinary gelatine as the alternative, and gives its costing for the gelatine version.
- CochinealThe Victorian red colouring, made from dried scale insects. It survives on labels as carmine or E120, so it is not a vanished ingredient, but it is not vegetarian.
- Hundreds and thousandsThe tiny hard sugar comfits sold in Britain under that name; nonpareils or sprinkles in American usage.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a solid cone and broken up with nippers before use. Three-quarters of a pound is about 1¾ cups by modern weight — a very sweet mixture by current taste.
Whisked jellies of this kind — snows, whips, sponges — were the showpieces of the late-Victorian cold table, and they depended entirely on the nineteenth-century transformation of gelatine from a luxury into a packet good. Making clear jelly had once meant boiling down calves' feet for hours; isinglass shortened the work, and commercially refined gelatine eventually put it within reach of an ordinary household cook. Cassell's positions this one as "a pretty dish for a Juvenile party," which is telling: the appeal is visual rather than gastronomic, and the instructions are mostly about appearance — pile it lightly, make it look as rocky as possible, break up the whiteness with comfits or a few drops of red. The printed cost of 1s. 3d. for eight or ten people, given as a matter of course alongside the method, reflects the dictionary's audience of cooks working to a household budget.