Home › Pudding Sauces › Red Currant Snow
Red Currant Snow
2 cups boiling water 1 cup sugar 2 tablespoons cornstarch 2 eggs (whites) When cooked thick, remove from fire and add the juice of 2 cups red currants crushed and pressed through a colander.
Beat the whites of 2 eggs, add a little sugar and pour over all.
Raspberries, strawberries and other fruits can be treated in the same way.
This recipe came from Women's Institute Branch of Department of Agriculture.
A cornstarch-thickened fruit sauce finished with sweetened beaten egg white — a "snow" in the sense of the white foam floated on top, not a frozen dessert. The recipe as printed lists egg whites once and calls for them again in the method; read the whites as the topping only.
- The egg whites are counted twiceTwo whites appear in the ingredient list and two more are beaten at the end. Almost certainly the same two: the cooked base is thickened by cornstarch alone, and adding whites to it would give you a cooked custard rather than a clear sauce.
- Cornstarch proportionTwo tablespoons to two cups of water is a modest proportion; the recipe says to cook it thick, but expect a pouring sauce rather than a set pudding, and the currant juice thins it further. Slake the starch in a little cold water first, then add it to the boiling sugar syrup, and cook two to three minutes after it clears so the raw starch taste goes.
- Add the juice off the heat, as directedThis is the hinge. Currant juice is strongly acidic and prolonged boiling with acid breaks cornstarch down, thinning the sauce and dulling the colour. Stir the juice in after the pan leaves the burner.
- How much juice two cups of currants givesExpect roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup of juice from two cups of crushed red currants pressed through a colander. A fine sieve or a doubled square of cheesecloth will keep out more seed and skin than a colander does.
- Raw egg white in the toppingThe beaten whites are poured over the sauce and never cooked. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized whites, which whip perfectly well with a little added sugar.
- Substituting other fruitRaspberries and strawberries are less acidic and less firm than currants, so they yield a softer, sweeter sauce; taste and cut the sugar back, and add a little lemon juice to keep the flavour from going flat.
- Yield and servingAbout 2 1/2 to 3 cups, enough for six to eight servings. Serve cool over steamed or cottage pudding, plain cake or blancmange; the whites will hold their shape for an hour or two at most, so assemble near the table.
The credit line matters here: the Women's Institutes began in Ontario in the late 1890s, generally traced to an 1897 meeting at Stoney Creek conventionally credited to Erland Lee and the local Farmers' Institute, with Adelaide Hoodless as the speaker whose address prompted it, and by the time this book circulated they were working closely with the provincial Department of Agriculture on rural home economics. Recipes gathered through those branches carried a certain institutional authority, which is why the Five Roses compilers name the source rather than a cook. The dish itself is an old form — a starch-thickened fruit sauce with sweetened beaten white floated on top, the same family as "snow" and "floating island" puddings — and it depended on the red currant bush, once a fixture of Canadian farm gardens and prized for a juice tart enough to season an otherwise plain steamed pudding. Currants fell out of general cultivation in North America in the twentieth century after they were identified as a host in the white pine blister rust cycle, which is part of why the fruit reads as unfamiliar now and did not then.