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Orange Snow Pudding
2 tablespoons lemon juice (juice of 1 large lemon) 1/2 cup orange juice 1 cup sugar 1/4 ounce vegetable gelatin 2/3 cup water in which to dissolve the gelatin 3 egg whites 1/4 teaspoon salt Prepare the gelatin by soaking and draining three times. After draining the last time, boil it in the two-thirds cup of water till dissolved. Strain it into the lemon juice, orange juice, sugar, and salt, which have been mixed together. Cool till nearly ready to set, then beat it into the stiffly beaten egg whites, and continue to beat till nearly ready to set again. Then quickly pour into cups wet with cold water. When cold, unmold and serve with a custard sauce in which the yolks of the eggs are used. This is so tender that in unmolding great care must be taken not to break the desserts.
A gelatin-set fruit whip of the type once called a snow pudding, here made with agar rather than animal gelatin. The method leaves the egg whites raw, which is why the dish should not be reproduced as printed.
- Why this one failsThe agar syrup is deliberately cooled almost to setting point before it meets the whites, so the three egg whites are never heated to a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Nothing later in the recipe cooks them: the pudding is chilled, unmolded and served cold. Use a current recipe built around pasteurized egg white if you want this dessert.
- Vegetable gelatinThis is agar-agar, sold as strands, flakes or powder. A quarter ounce is about 7 g, a firm set for the roughly one and a third cups of liquid here; agar sets harder and at a higher temperature than leaf or powdered animal gelatin, and the two are not interchangeable by weight.
- Soaking and draining three timesImported agar strands could carry a marine smell and some debris, and repeated soaking and pouring off the water rinsed that away. Modern food-grade agar powder is clean and needs no such treatment.
- Agar must boilUnlike gelatin, agar will not hydrate in warm liquid. It has to reach a full boil and be held there until the pieces disappear entirely, or the finished pudding will be gritty and will weep.
- The working windowAgar begins to gel at around 100°F, far above gelatin's setting point, which is why the original insists on speed once the mixture nears setting. There is no second chance: an agar mixture that has set cannot be folded, only remelted by boiling.
- Molds wet with cold waterRinsing the cups and leaving them wet, rather than oiling them, was the standard release for a delicate set. It works, and it is still the better choice for a pale fruit pudding where oil would dull the surface.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; it directs the aerated mixture into individual cup molds, and would fill roughly six small ones.
Snow pudding, a lemon jelly beaten into egg whites until white and foamy and served with a soft custard made from the leftover yolks, was a common invalid and children's dessert of the late nineteenth century: cheap, light, and thought easy on the stomach. What marks this version is the vegetable gelatin. Cookbooks associated with the American health-food and vegetarian reform movement of the period often avoided calf's-foot and commercial animal gelatin and substituted agar-agar, a seaweed extract then reaching Western kitchens by way of East Asia, where it had long been used for sweet jellied confections. The elaborate soaking and draining likely reflects the quality of imported agar strands at the time rather than any culinary necessity.