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Bird's Nest Jelly
A white corn-starch blanc mange is made in the proportion of 4 tablespoonfuls each of cornstarch and sugar to 1 pint of milk. This, after thorough cooking, is divided and each portion colored with chocolate, fruit, red color paste, raw yolk of egg, etc. When using eggs for the week or two preceding they should be emptied carefully out of a small hole in one end of the shell, the shells rinsed and put aside. These are now to be well rinsed again in water and filled with the blanc mange, then set away, propping them in an upright position in a pan of flour. When the blanc mange is firm the shells are cracked and peeled off and the eggs arranged on a bed of any kind of clear jelly (lemon, orange or wine) which has been broken with a fork. Thin strips of candied orange peel may be arranged round them to simulate a nest.
The dish is a Victorian conceit — cornstarch pudding moulded inside real eggshells and laid on shredded jelly — and two of its steps put it outside anything a modern kitchen should attempt. The vocabulary is worth decoding even so.
- Why it fails: the shellsShells saved over "the week or two preceding", rinsed and "put aside", then rinsed again and filled, are a straightforward Salmonella route. The exterior and the membrane can carry it, and nothing in the recipe reheats the filled shell — the pudding sets, is peeled, and goes to the table cold. There is no kill step after the shell is filled.
- Why it fails: the raw yolkOne portion is tinted with "raw yolk of egg" stirred into cooked blanc mange off the heat. Residual heat in a starch pudding does not reliably hold long enough at 160F to pasteurise a yolk, and the mixture is then chilled. If you want a yellow layer in a modern pudding, use a current recipe that cooks the yolk into the custard.
- Blanc mangeHere it means a plain cornstarch-thickened milk pudding, not the almond-and-gelatine blancmange of earlier English cookery. Four tablespoons of cornstarch to a pint of milk gives a stiff set, firm enough to unmould.
- Red color pasteA concentrated confectioner's colouring. Nineteenth-century versions were sometimes cochineal, sometimes coal-tar dyes of uncertain composition; several of the latter were later prohibited.
- Jelly "broken with a fork"A clear gelatine — lemon, orange or wine — raked into shreds to read as straw. The technique survives in modern chopped-jelly garnishes.
- The pan of flourSimply a support: flour holds the filled shells upright while they chill, in the way a tray of dried beans or rice would. It is not an ingredient.
- ScaleA pint of milk with 4 tablespoons of cornstarch would fill something like eight to ten eggshells, enough for a table of guests rather than a single family dessert.
Bird's-nest desserts belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian appetite for food that pretended to be something else — moulded jellies, aspics in the shape of fish, ices got up as fruit. This particular trick uses the saved shells of eggs broken for other cooking as disposable moulds, and it reads as thrift and showmanship at once: the shells cost nothing, and the result is a plausible clutch of tinted eggs. Cornstarch, milk and sugar were cheap, and the labour of piercing, rinsing and hoarding shells for a fortnight was assumed to be free. The same logic put jelly-and-cornstarch confections at the centre of household economy cookery for decades.