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Queen Mab's Pudding
1½ box of gelatine 1 pint of cream 1 teaspoonful of vanilla 1 pint of milk 4 eggs 2/3 of a cup of sugar Cover the gelatine with cold water, and soak a half hour. Whip the cream. Put the milk on to boil; when boiling, dissolve the gelatine in it, and strain. Beat the yolks and sugar together, stir into the boiling milk, and cook two minutes. Take from the fire, add the vanilla, and turn out into a tin basin to cool. Stand the basin in a pan of cracked ice, and stir constantly until it begins to thicken; then add the whipped cream; mix thoroughly, turn into a mould, and set away to harden. Serve with whipped cream heaped around it.
This is a Bavarian cream in a mould: gelatine-set custard lightened with whipped cream. Everything depends on catching the custard at the right thickness before the cream goes in.
- The hingeAdd the whipped cream the moment the custard begins to thicken over the ice — when it coats a spoon and just holds a trail. Too warm and the cream deflates into a dense jelly; too cool and the gelatine sets in lumps you cannot stir out.
- "1½ box of gelatine"Genuinely ambiguous. Box sizes varied by brand in the period, and the recipe does not say whose; a modern Knox box of four ¼-oz envelopes is the closest descendant, which on that reading would make this about 1½ oz for two pints of liquid — firmer than most would want. Around 1 oz (four envelopes) sets a mould that turns out cleanly without being rubbery.
- Soaking and dissolvingCover the granules with just enough cold water to absorb, five minutes rather than half an hour for modern powdered gelatine, then dissolve in the hot milk off a hard boil. Straining afterwards is not optional; it catches undissolved grains.
- "Cook two minutes"Yolks stirred into milk at the boil will thicken and reach a safe temperature quickly, but they will also scramble if the pan is left on high heat. Lower the flame and stir constantly; pull it at about 175F.
- Tin basin and cracked iceA wide metal bowl set in a pan of ice and water — the water matters, ice alone barely conducts. Any thin-walled metal bowl works; glass and ceramic cool too slowly for the timing here.
- The leftover whitesFour eggs go in, four yolks are used. The whites keep several days refrigerated, or go into a meringue or an ice with the same day's fruit.
- Moulding and servingRinse the mould with cold water before filling and chill at least four hours. Serves six to eight; dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a cold plate, then heap the extra whipped cream around the base as directed.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to the late-nineteenth-century genre of summer cookery — food that could be made in the cool of the morning, set in the icebox, and served without firing the range again. A moulded gelatine cream was the ideal candidate, and its arrival in ordinary American kitchens tracks the spread of two things: commercially boxed sheet and granulated gelatine, which replaced the tedious business of boiling calves' feet, and reliable domestic ice delivery. The name is generally traced to Mercutio's Queen Mab in Romeo and Juliet, the fairy queen no bigger than an agate-stone, applied to any dainty, pale, insubstantial-looking sweet; Victorian cookbooks on both sides of the Atlantic carry a Queen Mab's pudding, usually a cream jelly of this type, sometimes studded with candied peel or currants. This version keeps it plain, letting the vanilla and the whipped cream do the work.