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Snow Pudding
1½ box gelatine 2 cups of sugar Juice of three lemons 1 quart of milk 4 eggs 1 teaspoonful of vanilla 1 pint of boiling water Cover the gelatine with cold water, and let it soak a half hour. Then pour over it the boiling water, add the sugar, and stir until it is dissolved; then add the lemon juice, and strain the whole into a tin basin; place this in a pan of ice water, and let stand until cold. When cold, beat with an egg beater, until as white as snow; beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and stir them into the pudding. Dip a fancy mould into cold water; turn the pudding into it, and stand in a cold place four hours to harden.
A gelatine dessert of a type that filled American summer cookbooks, but the whites here are folded into a mixture that has already been chilled and are never cooked at any stage. Below is what the older wording means and where the recipe fails.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe gelatine syrup is deliberately cooled in ice water before the whites go in, so nothing in the finished pudding ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. The four hours in a cold place is a setting time, not a treatment. Use pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue instead.
- The missing custardThe ingredient list calls for a quart of milk, four eggs and vanilla, but the method uses only the whites. The yolks, milk and vanilla were most likely intended for a soft boiled custard poured round the turned-out pudding, a step the printed method omits. As given, the recipe is incomplete as well as unsafe.
- A box of gelatinePackaged granulated gelatine was sold by the box, subdivided into papers; a box is often reckoned at about an ounce, roughly four modern quarter-ounce envelopes, though weights varied by maker. On that reckoning one and a half boxes is about an ounce and a half, a stiff set by present tastes.
- Soaking, then boiling waterThe half-hour cold soak is not optional with old granulated gelatine: the grains must swell before the boiling water hits them or they clump. This part of the technique is unchanged today.
- "Beat until as white as snow"The whipping is done when the cooling jelly has thickened to about the consistency of raw egg white but has not set: too soon and it stays liquid, too late and it breaks into curds. The ice-water bath brings it to that point quickly.
- A tin basin and a fancy mouldThe tin basin is simply a metal mixing bowl, chosen for conducting cold quickly. The fancy mould is a fluted tin form, dipped in cold water so the set pudding releases; a modern jelly mould or bowl behaves the same way.
- YieldRoughly a quart of jelly before whipping, expanding once the whites go in; enough for eight to ten small servings.
Snow pudding, sometimes called snow jelly or lemon sponge, was a staple of American hot-weather cookery in the later nineteenth century, and its rise is generally traced to the arrival of cheap packaged gelatine. Before that, a cook wanting a set dessert boiled calves' feet or bought sheets of isinglass; once packaged gelatine came in, a lemon jelly whipped white with egg became the standard thing to serve on a July evening, cold and requiring no oven. Books of this kind leaned heavily on such dishes because a coal range in August made a heated kitchen unbearable. The pairing with a thin boiled custard, usually called soft custard or crème anglaise, is often said to be the conventional service, and would explain the otherwise idle quart of milk and four yolks in the ingredient list.