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Chocolate Pudding with Gelatin & Cocoa
Add a tablespoonful of granulated gelatin to a quarter of a cup of cold water; when soft add a quarter cup of boiling water. Beat three egg yolks with six tablespoonfuls of cocoa, a third of a cup of confectioners' sugar and a pinch of salt.
Beat the whites of the eggs stiff. Mix the yolks, cocoa and sugar gradually with the whites. Beat the gelatin and add that to the other mixture.
Put into a wet mold and chill. Turn out onto a platter and garnish with whipped cream, sweetened and flavored with vanilla.
This is a no-cook gelatin mousse: nothing in it ever gets warmer than the splash of boiling water used to dissolve the gelatin. That is the problem.
- The eggs are never cookedThree yolks and three whites go into the mold raw and are then chilled. There is no custard stage, no double boiler, no sugar syrup poured in hot. Raw shell eggs are the classic vehicle for Salmonella Enteritidis, and chilling does nothing to it.
- The boiling water does not helpA quarter cup of boiling water poured onto bloomed gelatin, then beaten into a cold bowl of yolks, sugar and cocoa, lands the mixture somewhere around room temperature. Pasteurizing egg requires holding the whole mass at a measured temperature for a measured time, which this method cannot do.
- Whipped whites are the worst caseBeaten whites carry a large surface area and are folded in last, so any contamination is distributed through an aerated, sugar-rich medium and then held for hours while it sets. Nothing in the recipe reduces the load.
- It is also served cold and slowThe pudding is unmolded onto a platter and garnished with whipped cream, meaning it sits out through a course. Time at room temperature is exactly what a lightly contaminated egg foam does not need.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for chocolate mousse or Bavarian cream, one built on a cooked custard base or on pasteurized eggs. Do not attempt to patch this one.
- On the gelatin, for referenceA tablespoonful of granulated gelatin is a little more than one modern envelope (an envelope is about 2¼ teaspoons, 7 g), and is a normal quantity for this volume. The gelatin is not the hazard here.
Cook and Be Cool belongs to a whole genre of early twentieth-century menu books built around not lighting the range in hot weather: gelatin desserts, cold soups, salads and moldings that could be assembled in the morning and left in the ice chest. Commercially packaged granulated gelatin, rather than calf's-foot jelly boiled at home, is what made this possible for ordinary households, and it appears in American cookbooks in quantity from the 1890s onward. The raw-egg foam set with gelatin was standard practice for decades, treated as unremarkable in books of this period; the general shift to cooked or pasteurized bases followed the Salmonella Enteritidis outbreaks associated with shell eggs from the late 1980s, which is why a recipe that was once perfectly respectable now reads as a warning.