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Floating Island
Into 3/4 of a pint of cream put sugar to make it very sweet, and the juice and rind of 1 lemon, grated. Beat it for ten minutes. Cut French rolls into thin slices, and lay them on a round dish on the top of the cream. On this put a layer of apricot or currant jam, and some more slices of roll. Pile up on this, very high, a whip made of damson jam, and the whites of 4 eggs. It should be rough to imitate a rock. Garnish with fruit or sweetmeats. Time, one hour and a half to prepare.
An English-style floating island: not the French poached meringue in custard, but a cold assembly of sweetened cream, sliced rolls, jam and a raw whipped topping. The topping is the problem.
- Why this one failsThe "whip" is raw egg white beaten with jam and served without any cooking. Whole raw whites carry a real risk of Salmonella, and nothing in the method heats them, acidifies them meaningfully, or holds them long enough to matter. Anyone wanting this effect should follow a current recipe built on pasteurised whites.
- The cream is also uncookedThree-quarters of a pint of cream is beaten with sugar and lemon and used without heating, under a raw egg-white topping. The recipe allows an hour and a half of preparation, though it says nothing about whether the assembled dish is kept cool.
- The measure is ambiguousThe measure can trip up modern readers -- in a British book 3/4 pint means 15 imperial fluid ounces, close to 1 7/8 US cups. Read against a US pint it would be 12 fluid ounces, and the difference is substantial.
- French rollsNot baguette. A nineteenth-century French roll was a small, soft, fine-crumbed white bread roll, closer to a modern dinner roll, sliced thin so it could soften into the cream.
- Damson jamDamsons are small, astringent dark plums, and their jam is sharper and firmer-set than ordinary plum preserve. Tart dark plum and damson preserves are still sold in Britain.
- "Sweetmeats"In this period the word covers candied peel, crystallised fruit, sugared almonds and preserved cherries rather than anything savoury.
The English floating island of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a piece of table architecture rather than a custard dessert. Where the French ile flottante sets poached meringue adrift on creme anglaise, the English version -- often linked to the syllabub and the whipped-cream "snow" dishes of earlier centuries -- built layers of sweetened cream, sliced bread or biscuit and preserves into a mound, then crowned it with a stiff whip raised as high as it would go. The instruction that it "should be rough to imitate a rock" is the whole point: these were showpieces, meant to be looked at before they were eaten, and the recipe's own garnish of fruit and sweetmeats finishes the effect.