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Delicate Pudding
1 1/2 cups water 1/2 cup sugar 1/8 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons corn starch 3 egg whites 1/2 cup lemon juice and grated rind Mix sugar, salt and water and bring to boiling point. Mix the corn starch in a little cold water, stir into the boiling syrup and cook ten minutes. Beat the egg whites to a dry froth and pour the boiling mixture into them; return to the fire one minute to set the egg, adding the lemon juice; turn into a mould that has been wet in cold water and set on ice. Serve with strawberries or other fruit piled high in the center, or pour a soft custard around as a sauce.
A cornstarch-set lemon snow pudding, light and sharp, meant to be unmoulded and filled with fruit. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the instructions assume an icebox and a cook who knew what "a dry froth" meant.
- The hinge: pour hot, beat fastThe boiling cornstarch mixture has to go into the whites while it is genuinely at a boil, in a thin stream, with the mixer running. Poured slowly onto still whites it will set into lumps and the pudding will be grainy rather than foamy.
- Egg whites and heatThe one minute back on the stove is what cooks the whites. Use a thermometer and take the mixture to 160F, stirring constantly, or start with pasteurized whites. Anyone feeding the very young, elderly or immune-compromised should use pasteurized whites as a matter of course.
- "A dry froth"This means stiff peaks, just short of the point where the foam looks dull and starts to break into clumps. Overbeaten whites will weep water into the finished pudding.
- Cook the cornstarch fullyTen minutes at a bare boil is not an exaggeration. Undercooked cornstarch tastes chalky and, worse, sets weakly, and this pudding has nothing else holding it up.
- Lemon quantityHalf a cup of juice is roughly three to four lemons; the rind is unspecified, and the grated zest of one lemon is a sensible reading. The recipe adds the juice during the final minute on the fire, with the egg.
- "Set on ice"Refrigerate until firm; several hours, or overnight for a clean unmoulding. A mould of about a quart, rinsed in cold water and not dried, should release with a brief dip in warm water and a plate on top.
- Soft custardThe sauce meant here is a stirred crème anglaise — egg yolks, milk, sugar, vanilla, cooked to a coating consistency and never boiled. It is also the obvious use for the three yolks this recipe leaves behind.
- YieldRoughly a quart, enough for four to six. It is very light, so the fruit piled in the center is not decoration but a good part of the dish.
This is snow pudding, sometimes called lemon sponge, one of the standard light desserts of American cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Older versions set the whipped whites with gelatin or isinglass; this one uses cornstarch, which became cheaper and more widely available as commercial corn-starch manufacture expanded in the second half of the 1800s. Puddings of this kind were valued for being eggy but not rich -- they turn up constantly in the invalid-cookery and "delicate dishes" chapters of period books, which is very likely where the name came from.