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Snow Pudding
Moisten the contents of one-half box of Larkin Gelatine in onehalf cup of cold water. Add to it a hot syrup made from one-half pint water, rind of one and juice of two lemons, three-fourths cup of sugar. Strain and let it remain until nearly cold and beginning to set; then add the beaten whites of two eggs. Beat ten minutes. Pile high in a glass dish and serve with a thin custard sauce.
A lemon gelatine whipped to a foam with raw egg white — a standard of the Victorian and Edwardian dessert table, and the reason it cannot be recommended as written today.
- The raw egg whiteThe beaten whites go into a syrup that has already cooled to setting point, so they are never heated at all and the finished pudding is served cold. Uncooked whites carry a Salmonella risk that period cooks did not know about, and beating for ten minutes aerates rather than pasteurises. If you want a snow pudding, work from a current recipe.
- Half a box of gelatineBox sizes varied by brand and period, but a half box is generally reckoned at about half an ounce, roughly two modern 1/4-oz envelopes. That is a firm set for the liquid given, and firmness is what lets the whipped mixture hold its piled shape.
- Larkin GelatineA house brand, long discontinued. Any unflavoured granulated gelatine is the equivalent; sheet gelatine is not interchangeable by volume.
- Old measuresHalf a pint is one cup. The total liquid — a cup of syrup plus half a cup for softening plus the lemon juice — comes to a little under two cups.
- "Nearly cold and beginning to set"This is the hinge of the method. Whip too early and the foam collapses back to liquid; too late and the gelatine sets in lumps that no amount of beating will smooth out. The window is short, usually a matter of minutes at room temperature.
- The custard sauce"Thin custard" means a stirred crème anglaise, egg yolks and milk cooked over gentle heat until it coats a spoon — not a baked custard and not a cornflour sauce. That component is cooked; the pudding itself is not.
- YieldAbout four servings from the quantities given, piled into a single glass bowl as the original directs rather than moulded.
Snow pudding — also called lemon sponge, lemon snow or Spanish cream in its milk-based cousin — was one of the most-copied desserts of American cookbooks between roughly 1870 and 1920, arriving with the commercial granulated gelatines that freed cooks from boiling down calves' feet for their own stock. The whole appeal was optical: a translucent lemon jelly beaten with egg white until it turned opaque and snow-white, then heaped high in cut glass and flooded with pale yellow custard, cheap to make and impressive on the table. The brand name in the text places this squarely in its commercial moment; the Larkin Company of Buffalo, a soap manufacturer, built an enormous mail-order business distributing its own groceries and premiums, and cookbooks circulating under such names served the double purpose of instruction and advertisement.