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Lemon Sponge
Soak one box of gelatine in one and a half pints of cold water then place in granite kettle with the grated rind and juice of three lemons and one cup of sugar. Let boil, pour off, and cool. (If the grated rind is not desired except for flavour the liquor should at this stage be strained.) When beginning to set add the whipped whites of two eggs and beat until spongy in appearance (length of time required differs with temperature). Then heap lightly in the dish from which it is to be served or in mould and place on ice. Should this be made in warm weather when impossible to procure ice, the whipped whites should not be beaten in thoroughly but the gelatine allowed to set and the eggfroth rising to the top should be served with the sponge as a sauce. By placing the bowl containing the gelatine in an outer vessel of cold water and changing the water about every half-hour or twenty minutes, the sponge will harden better.
A lemon sponge of the icebox era: boiled gelatine lemonade lightened with raw egg white. The gelatine base is cooked, but the whites are folded in after it has cooled and the dessert is never heated again, which is why it should be read rather than made.
- Why it failsThe whipped whites go into a cool, setting gelatine and are never brought to any temperature at all. Egg white is a recognised vehicle for Salmonella, and a sweet, moist, slowly-chilling gel held at room temperature — which the warm-weather variation explicitly allows — is a good growth medium. Use a current chilled-dessert recipe if you want this dish.
- The warm-weather note is the worst of itThe original suggests that when ice cannot be had, the whites be left as a froth on top and served as a sauce. That is uncooked egg white on a dessert cooled, at best, by a bowl of water changed every twenty minutes or so. Nothing in modern practice supports it.
- "One box of gelatine"Genuinely ambiguous. The box, not a weight, was the standard unit in recipes of this period, and box sizes varied between makers, so the set of the finished sponge cannot be reliably reconstructed from the text.
- Granite kettleGranite ware is enamelled sheet steel, valued here because tinned copper and iron discolour lemon juice and gelatine. Any non-reactive saucepan is the equivalent.
- "Let boil, pour off"Boiling gelatine hard weakens its setting power; the phrase means to bring it up just long enough to dissolve the sugar and gelatine, then pour it out of the kettle to cool. The rind is dealt with separately, in the parenthetical about straining.
- The cooling instructionsThe bowl-in-a-bowl of cold water changed every twenty minutes is a description of a kitchen with no mechanical refrigeration. It is also why this recipe spent hours in the temperature range food safety now tells you to move through quickly.
Lemon sponge belongs to a family of Victorian and Edwardian gelatine desserts — snow, whip, sponge, chartreuse — that became household cooking rather than confectioner's work once granulated gelatine was sold in boxes and no longer had to be extracted from calves' feet at home. The distinction the older books draw is one of texture: a jelly is set clear, a sponge is beaten while setting so that air is trapped and the mass turns opaque and light. Lemon was the usual flavouring, though the reasons for its dominance are a matter of speculation rather than record. The elaborate advice on ice, and the fallback for when ice cannot be procured, dates the recipe as clearly as anything in it: the ice was a bought commodity, delivered, and in hot weather often simply unavailable.