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Blackberry Sponge
1½ box of gelatine ½ pint of blackberry juice 1/2 cup of sugar 4 eggs 1 pint of boiling water Cover the gelatine with a half cup of cold water, and soak for a half hour; then pour over it the boiling water, add the sugar, and stir until dissolved; add the blackberry juice, and strain into a tin basin; put this basin in a pan of cracked ice to stand until cold and thick, stirring occasionally. Then beat to a stiff froth, add the well beaten whites of the eggs, and beat until smooth ; turn into a fancy pudding mould to harden. Serve with Vanilla Sauce poured around it.
A whipped gelatine "sponge" of the sort that filled summer dessert chapters before mechanical refrigeration. The method is sound but the eggs are never heated at any stage, which puts the dish outside what can be recommended today.
- Why this one failsThe beaten egg whites go into a mixture that has already been chilled to setting point, and the moulded sponge is served cold. Nothing in the recipe ever reaches a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the dessert then sits at room temperature while it is served. For a blackberry sponge today, use a current recipe built around a cooked or otherwise safe base.
- "1½ box of gelatine"Genuinely ambiguous. Boxes of granulated gelatine sold around 1900 varied in weight from maker to maker, and a modern envelope is a quarter ounce. There is no reliable conversion from the wording alone.
- Blackberry juicePressed and strained from ripe fruit, unsweetened and unthickened — not the bottled cordial or syrup sold under that name now. A pint and a half of it is a lot of berries, on the order of three to four pounds.
- Tin basin and cracked iceTin conducts cold quickly from the ice packed around the basin; a metal bowl in an ice-water bath does the same job.
- "Cold and thick"The hinge of the whole method: the gelatine must be at the point of setting, thick as raw egg white, before it will hold air. Beaten too soon it stays liquid, beaten too late it breaks into lumps that never smooth out.
- The mouldA "fancy pudding mould" is a fluted or figured tin form, turned out once the sponge has hardened in the cold. Beaten, the mixture would need a mould of roughly a quart and a half to two quarts.
- Vanilla SauceLikely a thin custard-type sauce flavoured with vanilla, poured in a pool around the turned-out sponge, though period vanilla sauces were also made without eggs. It is presumably a separate recipe elsewhere in the book.
"Sponge" in nineteenth-century dessert vocabulary means a gelatine jelly beaten to a foam and lightened with egg white -- lighter than a jelly, less rich than a Bavarian cream. Such dishes spread as granulated gelatine became available ready-refined in packets over the later nineteenth century, reducing the older labour of boiling down calves' feet or clarifying isinglass. They suit hot weather: one kettle of boiling water and then nothing but cold, here supplied by cracked ice. Blackberries, ripening in high summer and yielding freely to the press, were an obvious fruit for such a dish.