Effingham Pinto
Celebrity Photo
MAPLE SPONGE
1 envelope Knox Sparkling Gelatine 1½ cups cold water 1/2 cup hot water Whites of 2 eggs 1 cup chopped nut meats 2 cups brown or maple sugar Soak gelatine in cold water five minutes. Put sugar and hot water in saucepan, bring to boiling point and let boil ten minutes. Pour syrup gradually on soaked gelatine. Cool, and when nearly set, add whites of eggs beaten until stiff, and nut meats. Turn into mold, first dipped in cold water, and chill. Serve with custard made of yolks of eggs, sugar, a few grains of salt, milk, and flavoring.
This is a gelatine sponge of the sort that filled American cookbooks between about 1890 and the 1930s, and the method has one step that no longer passes muster.
- The egg whites are never cookedThe boiled syrup is poured onto the gelatine and then cooled until nearly set before the beaten whites go in, so the eggs meet a mixture well below any temperature that would pasteurise them. Nothing later in the recipe heats them either — the sponge only goes into a mold and a refrigerator. Raw shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella, and a dessert that will sit chilled for hours before serving is exactly the wrong place for them.
- The accompanying custard is unmeasuredThe sauce is given as "yolks of eggs, sugar, a few grains of salt, milk, and flavoring" with no quantities, no pan instructions and no indication of how far to cook it. A stirred custard generally thickens somewhere around 170-180F, and egg mixtures need to reach at least about 160F to be safe, and this text gives the cook nothing to work from. Use a current recipe for both the sponge and the sauce.
- Knox Sparkling GelatinePeriod Knox envelopes appear to have held more gelatine than today's quarter-ounce envelope, so old recipes calling for "one envelope" should not be treated as interchangeable with a modern one, and 1 u00bd cups of cold water for soaking is far more than a modern envelope will absorb.
- Maple or brown sugar"Maple sugar" here means the hard cake sugar sold in blocks and grated or chopped, not maple syrup; substituting syrup changes both the liquid balance and the set. The recipe simply allows either sugar.
- Boiling the syrup ten minutesTwo cups of sugar with half a cup of water boiled a full ten minutes will take the syrup well past thread stage. The instruction is not a mistake, but it is a hot sugar syrup and behaves like one.
Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the charity or promotional cookbook built from recipes solicited from stage performers, whose names sold the book far more effectively than the cooking did. The appearance of a brand name in the ingredient list u2014 here Knox Sparkling Gelatine, spelled out in full u2014 is at least consistent with the reach of the gelatine manufacturers, who were among the busiest recipe publishers of the era and had by this date spent some years teaching American households that granulated gelatine could be trusted straight from the packet rather than boiled down from calves' feet; whether the brand appears here by any arrangement is not something the page tells us. "Sponge" in this period generally meant a gelatine base whipped or lightened with beaten egg white so that it set porous rather than clear, distinct from a jelly, a cream, or a Bavarian. Maple sugar gave it a distinctly North American flavor, and the leftover yolks going into a custard sauce is the sort of thrift that ran through household cooking of the time.