Green Colouring

This is a cold, uncooked pistachio soufflé — a set cream stiffened with gelatine and raw egg white, never exposed to heat at any stage. It cannot be recommended as written, and the original in any case omits the quantities entirely.

• Raw egg white is never cookedThe whites go in whipped and the mixture is only chilled until firm. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the dish then sits in a "cool place" — which in a period kitchen need not mean refrigeration — for as long as the gelatine takes to set. A current recipe using pasteurised whites should be followed instead.
• No quantities at allThe page reads as a fragment: the title "Green Colouring" does not match the instructions beneath it, and no ingredient list accompanies them. Cream, whites, castor sugar, nuts, flavouring, colouring and gelatine are all named but none is measured, so the set of the gelatine — the whole structure of the sweet — is unguessable.
• The colouring itselfVictorian "green colouring" for confectionery was sometimes mineral-based, and salmon-pink shades came from cochineal or from coal-tar dyes of uncertain composition. Whatever the book intended, it is not a modern food colour and should not be reconstructed from a period formula.
• Terms in the textCastor sugar is superfine granulated. A "forcer" is a piping tube — a small rose forcer is a star nozzle. "Sweet jelly" means a clear flavoured gelatine jelly, poured on at the point of setting so it glazes rather than sinks.
• The paper collarThe collar pinned round each case is the whole trick of the dish: the mixture is filled above the rim of the case so that when the paper comes away the sweet stands proud and appears to have risen in the oven, though it has never seen one.