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Snow Pudding (Mrs Fannie Smith)
— Mrs. Fannie Smith
Six eggs (whites), three tablespoons of sugar, half a box of gelatine, juice of three lemons, one pint of boiling water. Dissolve the gelatine in a gill of cold water, then add the lemon juice, sugar and boiling water. Let stand till cold. Beat the whites of the eggs and have bowl stand in ice water, then pour into it the gelatine mixture and beat until it begins to thicken. Pour into moulds.
— Mrs. George Person
This is a raw-white snow pudding: nothing in it is ever heated to a temperature that would pasteurize the eggs, and the whites make up most of the volume. A few notes on the old measures follow, but the dish should not be built from this text.
- Raw egg whites are the body of the puddingSix whites are beaten and then combined with the gelatine mixture. The only hot element, a pint of boiling water, goes into the gelatine, lemon juice and sugar, and that mixture is deliberately left to stand until cold before it ever touches the whites. The whites are never brought anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella is reliably killed.
- No cooked base at allMany period snow puddings pair the whites with a stirred custard sauce that is cooked; this one has no cooked component whatsoever. If you want this dessert, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue base.
- "Half a box of gelatine"A nineteenth-century box of granulated gelatine is usually reckoned at about an ounce, so half a box comes out in the region of two modern quarter-ounce envelopes. Boxes were not uniformly subdivided and sizes varied by brand, so the quantity here is genuinely approximate.
- A gillHalf a cup, used to soak the gelatine; it stays in the mixture, so the total liquid is that gill plus a pint of boiling water and the juice of three lemons.
- The sugar looks wrong to a modern palateThe sugar looks low -- Three tablespoons against three lemons' juice would be very sharp; later published versions of this dessert commonly use half a cup or more. Whether the small quantity is what the contributor intended or a slip in setting cannot be determined from the page.
- Double attributionThe page carries two names, Mrs. Fannie Smith at the head and Mrs. George Person at the foot. The leading dash suggests the first may in fact close the preceding recipe; either way, which contributor this pudding belongs to is not certain from the text.
Snow pudding, sometimes called lemon snow, was a common "light" dessert in American household cookery in the later nineteenth century, and packaged gelatine made it easy: a cook wanting a moulded jelly had previously to boil down calves' feet or use isinglass. Such puddings were often recommended for invalids and for hot weather, on the reasoning that they were cooling and contained no butter or cream.