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Pineapple Snow
1 can sliced pineapple 1/2 pt. cold water 2 egg-whites Dissolve gelatine in cold water, then add pineapple juice and heat to boiling point. Beat until foamy, two cups sugar and juice of two lemons.
Combine with hot mixture and add chopped pineapple. Cool, stir in beaten whites of two eggs, and put in icebox to set. Serve with whipped cream.
Two problems sit in this short paragraph: the ingredient list is incomplete, and the egg whites are folded into a mixture that has already cooled.
- Raw egg whites, never heatedThe gelatine and juice are brought to a boil, but that liquid is deliberately cooled before the whites go in, so the eggs are never brought to any temperature at all. Uncooked whites in a chilled dessert that then sits for hours are a recognised Salmonella route; a current recipe using pasteurised or cooked-meringue methods should be used instead.
- The gelatine quantity is missingGelatine appears in the method but never in the list. There is no way to recover the intended amount from the text, and guessing at it is how snow puddings end up either soupy or rubbery.
- Half a pint of cold waterThat is one cup in US measure. It is the soaking liquid for the gelatine, not the whole liquid of the dish, which also takes the drained juice of the can and the juice of two lemons.
- Two cups of sugarAn unusually heavy hand even by the standards of period gelatine desserts.
- "Beat until foamy" applies to the sugar and lemonThe instruction is ambiguously placed, but the sense is that sugar and lemon juice are whisked together and then combined with the hot gelatine mixture, before the whites appear at all.
- IceboxA literal ice-cooled cabinet, considerably warmer and less steady than a modern refrigerator.
Snow puddings — gelatine, sugar, acid fruit and beaten egg white — were a fixture of American community and club cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward, made practical by packaged granulated gelatine, which replaced the older business of boiling calves' feet. Pineapple here almost certainly means canned pineapple, which became widely available from Hawaii in the early twentieth century; the recipe's reliance on the can's juice as well as its fruit shows how the tinned product shaped the method. The compressed, half-punctuated style and the missing gelatine measurement are typical of community cookbooks, where contributors wrote for neighbours who already knew roughly how such a pudding went together.