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Snow Balls
Beat the whites of four eggs. Mix one cup of cream, two tablespoons of sugar, a teaspoon of baking powder and flour to make a batter, and add the whites of the eggs. Fill buttered cups two-thirds full of the mixture, and bake in a hot oven.
A batter of cream and stiff egg whites baked in individual cups, closer to a plain popover-cum-teacake than to bread. The original leaves the flour to the cook's judgment, which is the main thing to settle before you begin.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe whites are the only real lift here, the single teaspoon of baking powder notwithstanding. Beat them to soft-firm peaks and fold them into the finished batter in two additions, stopping while streaks are still visible.
- "Flour to make a batter"Genuinely open-ended. For one cup of cream and four whites, expect somewhere between 1 1/4 and 1 3/4 cups of flour; aim for a batter that falls thickly from the spoon rather than pouring. Err on the slack side, since a stiff batter will not dome.
- Hot ovenRead this as roughly 400 to 425F; the recipe gives no temperature. The high heat sets the outside quickly and gives the puffed, rounded top.
- CreamPeriod 'cream' was not standardised, but in a batter like this it was likely richer than modern half-and-half, and the fat is doing the work of butter, of which there is none. Do not substitute milk without adding a couple of tablespoons of melted butter.
- Buttered cupsCustard cups, ramekins or a standard muffin tin, all generously buttered. Two-thirds full is deliberate: these rise sharply and will spill if filled higher.
- Baking powderPowders of this period were generally single-acting, releasing most of their gas as soon as they met liquid, unlike modern double-acting powder. Either way, there is no reason to let this batter stand once the whites are in.
- Time and yieldNo time is given. Reckon on 18 to 22 minutes in muffin cups, until well risen and dry to a skewer, and do not open the oven in the first ten minutes. Makes about eight to ten cups.
- ServingBarely sweetened at two tablespoons of sugar, these want a hard sauce, a lemon or wine sauce, or simply jam. Turn them out and serve hot; they collapse and toughen as they cool.
"Snow balls" was a loose nineteenth-century name for anything small, round and conspicuously white, and it attached to several unrelated dishes at once: steamed rice-and-apple puddings tied in cloths, coconut-covered cakes, and light egg-white batters baked in cups like this one. The categories were fluid: a chemically leavened batter baked in individual moulds sat comfortably beside muffins, gems and popovers, and whether the result counted as bread, cake or pudding depended mostly on what sauce arrived with it. The heavy reliance on beaten whites also points back to an older tradition, before reliable commercial baking powder, when eggs did nearly all the lifting; the single teaspoon of powder here is a hedge rather than the main engine.