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Lemon Snow Pudding
Boil a pint of milk, then stir in two table-spoonfuls of corn-flour, and half a breakfast-cupful of sugar; let it come to boiling point, take it off the fire and keep stirring till nearly cold; then add the juice of three lemons and the whites of five eggs beaten to a froth; beat them all together till cool. Pour the mixture in a mould, and put it on ice or in a cool place to set. Serve garnished with slices of lemon, and with a sauce prepared as follows. Boil half a pint of milk; beat up the yolks of the five eggs with a little sugar, pour in the boiling milk; return to the saucepan and boil. Put on ice to cool.
This is a cold set pudding in which five egg whites are beaten raw into a cooled cornflour base and then chilled — the whites are never brought to any temperature at all. That single structural fact is the problem with the recipe.
- The whites are never cookedThe milk-and-cornflour base is deliberately cooled "till nearly cold" before the froth goes in, and the mould then goes onto ice to set. Nothing in the method takes the egg white above room temperature, so raw-egg risk (Salmonella) sits in the finished dish. Use a current recipe for a cold lemon soufflé or snow pudding, which will either cook the whites in a hot syrup or specify pasteurised ones.</text>
- Chilling is not a control"Put it on ice or in a cool place" leaves the temperature to the cook: ice would hold the pudding cold, but a "cool place" in a period kitchen need not be, and the recipe gives no holding time at all. A milk-and-raw-egg dessert with no stated temperature or time is the combination modern food handling is written to prevent.
- The lemon juice does nothing for safetyThree lemons make the mixture sharp, and acid is sometimes assumed to make raw egg safe. It does not; the pH here is nowhere near low enough or held long enough to be a kill step.
- The sauce has its own faultA yolk custard told to "return to the saucepan and boil" will scramble; as printed the instruction works against itself, since custard thickens well below boiling.
- Reading the measuresFor reference when comparing with a modern version: corn-flour here is cornstarch, not cornmeal or masa; a breakfast-cupful is roughly 8-10 fl oz, so half is about half a cup of sugar; the pint is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz.
"Snow pudding" is a common nineteenth-century name for a pale, aerated cold sweet -- whipped egg white with gelatine, cornflour or arrowroot to hold it -- and lemon is one of the usual flavourings. Cornflour was sold in Britain from around the middle of the century as a branded convenience starch. The accompanying yolk sauce is the tidy Victorian economy at work: the whites build the pudding, the yolks become the custard poured round it, and nothing from the five eggs is wasted. The same logic lies behind the pairing of meringue and crème anglaise, wherever a cook was working with whole eggs and no way to store the leftover half.