Home › Some Kitchen Kinks › Some Kitchen Kinks: Boil
Some Kitchen Kinks: Boil
Boil sugar and water together with a thin piece of lemon rind for three minutes. Cool, add lemon juice, and freeze like ice cream.
Orange Ice.-½ cupful of water; 2 small oranges; 3 tablespoonfuls of sugar.
Make and freeze like lemon ice.
Prune Jelly.-1 cupful of prunes; 1½ tablespoonfuls of gelatin; 3 tablespoonfuls of sugar. Stew prunes in sufficient water to cover them well. When tender, press through a potato ricer, add gelatin previously soaked for half an hour in a little water, return to the fire, add sugar, reheat, and pour in molds to cool.
Apple and Custard.-1 large apple; 1 tablespoonful of sugar; 1 teaspoonful of cornstarch; yolk of 1 egg. Pare and core apple, fill the cavity with sugar, put a little water in the bottom of a dish, and bake. Make a custard of a cupful of milk, sugar, cornstarch, and egg. Flavor to taste after boiling thick and pour around the baked apple. Use the white for a meringue. Eat cold.
Slip. -1 tablespoonful of cornstarch; 2 cupfuls of boiling water; cupful of sugar; juice and rind of 1 lemon; white of 1 egg.
Boil the cornstarch till thick in water, add sugar and lemon, and pour into a baking dish. Beat the white of egg with a tablespoonful of powdered sugar, spread on top, brown slightly, and serve cold with cold boiled custard.
Egg Cream.-2 eggs; 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar; juice and rind of lemon.
Separate yolks from whites of eggs and beat the yolks with sugar in bowl until well mixed, then add lemon, and place bowl in a dish on the stove.
Stir slowly until the mixture begins to thicken, add the beaten whites of eggs, and stir until it is like thick cream.
A run of small single-portion desserts, printed one after another with the fractions half lost. Read the quantities skeptically before you shop.
- The lemon ice has no amountsThe page opens mid-recipe: the sugar and water quantities were on the previous line and did not survive. For a lemon ice of this type, roughly 1 cup sugar to 2 cups water, boiled with the rind, then the juice of 2 lemons added after cooling, is in the right range.
- "11 tablespoonfuls of gelatin" is a misprintThat much gelatin would set a bucket of prunes into rubber. A cupful of stewed prune pulp needs about 1 tablespoon of granulated gelatin, or one envelope. Soak it in cold water first, as directed, then dissolve it in the hot fruit off the boil.
- Dropped fractions elsewhere"Cupful of sugar" in Slip lacks its fraction and was probably a half in the original setting. Half a cup of sugar to 2 cups of thickened cornstarch is already sweet.
- Freeze like ice creamThat meant a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and coarse salt. In an electric churn, spin the chilled syrup 20-25 minutes. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours; a water ice left undisturbed sets as a solid block.
- Baked apple350F for 40-50 minutes for one large apple, until a knife goes through without resistance. The water in the dish is there to keep the skin from scorching; add more if it cooks dry.
- Browning the meringue"Brown slightly" on a starch pudding is a job for high heat and short time: 425F for 4-5 minutes, or under a broiler watched constantly.
- Egg cream is a sabayonEgg cream is a sabayon in method -- the bowl set "in a dish on the stove" looks like a water bath, though the recipe does not say the dish holds water. Keep the heat gentle and stir until the yolks thicken and coat the spoon, around 170F. Direct heat will scramble two yolks quickly.
- YieldThe quantities are small, roughly one to two servings each.
These read like invalid cookery, the corner of nineteenth-century domestic manuals devoted to feeding the sick: tiny quantities, one egg or one apple, nothing fried, nothing highly seasoned, and everything soft or cold -- though nothing on the page says so outright. Lemon and orange ices were often recommended in period sick-cookery for fevers and for patients who could keep little else down. "Slip" is an old name for a soft set dessert of curd or starch that slips from its mold; here it is applied to a cornstarch pudding with a meringue on top. The prune jelly is a common period gelatin dessert built on a widely stocked dried fruit, and the potato ricer doing duty as a sieve suggests a kitchen that owned few specialized tools and used each of them for several jobs.