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Lemon Foam
2 cups hot water 1 cup sugar 2 tablespoons (rounding) cornstarch 1 lemon 3 eggs (whites) Put the hot water and sugar into double boiler or saucepan. When it boils, add the cornstarch moistened with a little cold water and stir. After cooking 4 or 5 minutes, squeeze in the juice of 1 lemon (or lemon extract) stirring steadily. Now whip to a stiff froth with wire spoon the whites of 3 eggs in a large earthen dish. By this time the cooked cornstarch, which has been stirred constantly, is cool enough to be poured over the egg whites. Beat rapidly, and in a few minutes the whole mass will be light and foamy and ready to be set away to cool. The colder it can be kept the better.
Serve with custard. Very good as summer dessert.
Heat the milk, add salt and flour (which has been softened in a little milk) and cook 10 minutes after it has thickened.
Mix together butter, sugar and yolks of eggs. Pour hot mixture over, stirring well, and set aside to cool. Add vanilla and cocoanut. Lastly, fold in the stiffly beaten whites. Bake in buttered pan in moderate oven till firm. Serve with hot chocolate sauce No. 1.
A cornstarch-and-lemon foam from the pudding-sauce chapter, and one of the clearest examples in the book of a dessert built on uncooked egg white. The printed text also runs two unrelated recipes together.
- Why it fails todayThe cooked cornstarch is poured over the whites only once it has cooled ("is cool enough to be poured over the egg whites"), and the whole thing is then chilled and served. Nothing in the method brings the egg whites to a safe temperature, so any Salmonella present in the shell eggs may survive, and the foam is then held cold before being spooned over a cold custard. Use a current recipe if you want a lemon foam sauce.
- The text is garbledEverything from "Heat the milk, add salt and flour" belongs to a different recipe — a baked coconut pudding served with chocolate sauce. Its ingredients (milk, flour, butter, sugar, egg yolks, vanilla, coconut) are nowhere in the list above, so that half cannot be followed at all.
- Rounding tablespoonsA "rounding" tablespoon is heaped above level; period usage puts it at anywhere from half as much again to twice a level spoonful, so the cornstarch here is appreciably more than two level tablespoons — enough to thicken two cups of liquid substantially before the whites go in.
- Wire spoon and earthen dishA wire spoon is a spoon-shaped wire whisk; the earthen dish is a glazed pottery bowl. Any large glass or stainless bowl does the same job.
- Lemon extract is not a substituteThe recipe offers extract as an alternative to the juice of a lemon, but juice supplies roughly two to three tablespoons of acid liquid as well as flavour. Extract gives the perfume and none of the tartness that this sauce depends on.
- ServingThe book gives no yield; it directs simply that the foam be served with custard and calls it "very good as summer dessert."
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company in the 1910s to promote its flour, and it was assembled from recipes contributed by housewives across Canada — which accounts for the plain domestic voice here. Sauces of this kind, cornstarch thickened and lightened with beaten white, went by a family of names in nineteenth-century cookery: foam sauce, snow sauce. They belonged to an era when a boiled pudding or a plain cornstarch mould was the everyday dessert and the sauce was where the flavour and the extravagance went. Cornstarch itself was a relatively young convenience, commercially manufactured from maize from the mid-1800s, and books like this one leaned on it heavily as a cheap, reliable thickener that needed no egg yolks.