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Sunshine Pudding
Dissolve 5 scant teaspoons gelatine in 2½ cups boiling water, and strain. Beat the whites of 4 eggs with 2 cups granulated sugar, then beat with the gelatine for 15 or 20 minutes. Add 1 teaspoon cold water, a little vanilla, and set away to harden slightly. Very delicious.
This is a gelatine sponge — sometimes called snow pudding or Spanish cream — in which beaten egg whites are aerated into a hot gelatine syrup and left to set. As written, the whites never come near a safe temperature, so the notes below are for reading rather than cooking.
- Why it failsThe gelatine water is boiling when strained, but it is beaten into cold whites and two cups of sugar in an open bowl for a quarter of an hour. Nothing in the method holds the mixture at any controlled temperature, so the whites cannot be relied on to reach a safe one. The finished pudding is essentially uncooked egg left to set. If you want this dessert, use a current recipe built around a cooked or otherwise pasteurised base.
- Gelatine is not what it wasFive scant teaspoons of period sheet or granulated gelatine is not directly comparable to five teaspoons of modern powdered gelatine, which is standardised and generally more consistent in its setting strength. Any straight substitution is guesswork, which is part of why the original gives such a vague endpoint.
- "Strain"Older gelatine could carry impurities and undissolved grit, which is the likely reason for the instruction. Present-day powdered gelatine dissolves clean and the step would be redundant.
- Fifteen or twenty minutes of beatingThat timing assumes a hand whisk or a rotary egg beater. It is not a flavour instruction: it is the time needed to whip air in while the gelatine cools to the point where it holds the foam.
- "Set away to harden slightly"No temperature or place is specified, and in a kitchen of this date that could mean anything from a cold larder to an icebox. Leaving a raw-egg foam to stand at ambient temperature is the specific practice that makes this recipe unusable today.
- MisfiledNothing here is boiled and nothing is steamed in a mould, despite the heading it appears under; in books of this kind "pudding" simply meant a sweet course.
- SweetnessTwo cups of sugar to four whites is a lot of sugar, and the result is closer to a soft uncooked meringue than a set cream. The single teaspoon of cold water at the end has no discernible function.
Gelatine desserts of this kind were a mark of the modern kitchen when the Five Roses Cook Book was compiled — packaged granulated gelatine had, over the previous few decades, replaced the long labour of boiling calves' feet for stock jelly, putting jellies and whipped creams within reach of ordinary households. The name "sunshine" attaches to a whole family of pale, aerated, egg-white confections of the era, sunshine cake among them, and period recipes of that family are frequently flavoured with lemon or orange. The Five Roses book itself was distributed by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as flour promotion, its contents largely gathered from Canadian home cooks, which accounts for the telegraphic style, the absence of yield, and the closing verdict — "Very delicious" — standing in for any description of the result.