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Lemon Snowballs
1 T lemon juice 2/3 C flour with 2 egg yolks, beaten very light 1/2 C sugar 2 T water ½ lemon rind, grated 1 t baking powder, scant Mix in order given. Then fold in well beaten whites of eggs. Pour batter into ten custard cups or buttered paper cases and steam one-half hour. When done turn out and roll in powdered sugar and serve with lemon sauce.
Mrs. Charles Greenwood. 2 C flour 1 T shortening ½ C sugar
A steamed lemon sponge, baked in nothing — the cups sit in a covered pan over simmering water. The recipe is set in the cramped two-column style of church cookbooks, so the ingredient list needs untangling before you start.
- The stray last line"2 C flour 1 T shortening 1½ C sugar" -- does not belong to this recipe. It looks like a fragment carried over from the neighbouring column or entry, and adding it would give you a stiff dough rather than a batter.
- Reading the abbreviationsT is tablespoon, t teaspoon, C cup. So: 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 2/3 cup flour, 2 egg yolks, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons water, 1 teaspoon baking powder (scant).
- "1½ lemon rind, grated"This means the grated zest of one and a half lemons, not a measured 1½ of anything. Take only the yellow; the white pith is bitter and there is a great deal of zest here relative to the flour.
- Order of mixing"Mix in order given" is best read as beating the yolks with the sugar until pale, then the lemon juice, water and zest, then the flour sifted with the baking powder. Fold the stiff whites in last and lose as little air as possible — with only a scant teaspoon of baking powder, the whites carry most of the lift.
- How to steamFill the cups no more than two-thirds. Stand them in a deep pan on a rack or folded cloth, add boiling water to halfway up the cups, cover tightly and keep the water at a bare simmer for 30 minutes. Do not let it boil hard or the puddings will be coarse and tunnelled.
- Buttered paper casesThese were small cases folded or pleated from stiff paper and buttered before filling. Modern paper liners set in a muffin tin will do, but they slump under steam; the custard cups are the safer route.
- Doneness and finishingThe tops should be dry, springy, and just shrinking from the sides. Turn them out while hot and roll in powdered sugar at once; the sugar clings far better to a warm pudding than a cooled one.
- The lemon sauceNo recipe is given here, and the reader is expected to have one to hand (it may appear elsewhere in the book). A cooked sauce of sugar, cornstarch, boiling water, butter and lemon juice, thickened over heat, is the usual form in this period.
- YieldTen small puddings, one or two per person. They are best served warm; steamed sponge firms up noticeably as it cools.
Steamed puddings in individual cups were a practical solution in kitchens where the range oven was unreliable or already occupied — a covered pot on a burner holds a far steadier temperature than a wood or early gas oven, and the cook can turn out ten identical portions with no crust to worry about. Rolling them in powdered sugar to make them white and round is the explanation usually offered for the "snowball"; the name attaches to several different puddings and cakes in American community cookbooks of this era, the common thread being said to be the sugar coating rather than any fixed batter. Church and society cookbooks of this kind were often compiled by subscription, each contributor sending in a favorite under her married name, and the results were often set in type by a local printer who was not a cook — which may be how three ingredients from a neighboring recipe end up stranded at the bottom of Mrs. Greenwood's.