Flora Zabelle
LEMON SPONGE OR SNOW PUDDING
1½ envelope Knox Sparkling Gelatine 1/4 cup cold water 1 cup boiling water 3/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup lemon juice Whites of two eggs Soak gelatine in cold water five minutes, dissolve in boiling water, add sugar, lemon juice and grated rind of one lemon, strain, and set aside; occasionally stir mixture, and when quite thick, beat with wire spoon or whisk until frothy; add whites of eggs beaten stiff, and continue beating until stiff enough to hold its shape. Pile by spoonfuls on glass dish. Chill and serve with boiled custard. A very attractive dish may be prepared by coloring half the mixture red with tablet found in each package.
Sincerely yours,
A late-Victorian and Edwardian standard, and a straightforward one apart from a single problem: the meringue is never cooked, and neither is the custard poured round it in most versions of the period.
- Uncooked egg whitesThe two whites are beaten raw into a cooled gelatine base and served cold. Nothing in the method brings them near a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the dish then sits at room temperature while it is piled and dished. This is the reason the recipe should not be made as printed; a current snow pudding recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue should be followed instead.
- The boiled custardThe sauce is assumed rather than given. Period boiled custards were held below the boil deliberately, and old instructions are vague about how far below, which is a second uncontrolled point in the same dish.
- An envelope of KnoxA Knox envelope is 1/4 oz, about 7 g of granulated gelatine, which measures a scant tablespoon (roughly 2¼ teaspoons), and that quantity has been consistent for a long time. An envelope and a half is therefore something over a tablespoon.
- The colouring tabletKnox packets once included a small tablet of red colouring for exactly this sort of two-tone effect. It has not been in the box for generations; the instruction will read as nonsense to anyone opening a modern packet.
- "Sparkling" gelatineNot carbonated. It was Knox's trade description for clear, unflavoured granulated gelatine.
- YieldA cup and a quarter of liquid plus the whipped whites gives roughly four to six modest servings, piled in spoonfuls rather than moulded.
Snow pudding, also called lemon sponge, was a very common dessert in American cookbooks between about 1880 and 1930 — Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carries a closely similar version. Its appeal was economy and effect: a little gelatine, a lemon, two whites and some sugar produce a large, glittering white mound that looked far more expensive than it was, and the boiled custard used up the yolks. That it is built on Knox gelatine is no accident either; granulated gelatine in packets, sold from Johnstown, New York, turned a dessert that had once required hours of calf's-foot boiling into a five-minute soak, and the company's booklets pressed recipes like this one on housekeepers. Flora Zabelle, an Armenian-American actress of the New York musical stage and the wife of the comedian Raymond Hitchcock, was contributing to a collection of performers' recipes, a genre in which the famous name mattered rather more than novelty in the cooking.