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Fairy Pudding
Put a tumbler of firm quince jelly into a saucepan, add 1 cupful of boiling water, stir until the jelly is melted and the liquid at the boiling point. Add quickly to it 2 tablespoonfuls of corn-starch mixed with a pinch of salt and sufficient cold water to make a thin paste, stir until clear and smooth, then draw to one side and cook slowly for ten minutes. Turn into a large bowl and when cold and beginning to stiffen beat long and hard with an egg beater until it is quite light, add the whipped whites of 2 eggs and continue to beat until it is a feathery mass. Turn into wetted molds and set aside, serving very cold with cream or a custard sauce. Any firm jelly will do but quince gives a peculiarly delicate flavor.
A cornstarch-thickened fruit jelly whip of the sort that filled dessert columns before gelatin came in boxes. The problem is the finish: two raw egg whites are folded into an already-cooled mixture that is then chilled and served, so the eggs never reach any temperature at all.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe cornstarch is cooked, but the whipped whites go in after the base is cold and stiffening, and the pudding is molded and served cold. Nothing in the process brings the whites above room temperature, so any Salmonella present in or on the shell egg is carried straight to the table. Use a current recipe for a fruit whip or fool, built on pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue, if you want this dessert.
- Why chilling does not helpRefrigeration slows bacterial growth but kills nothing. A dessert that sits several hours in a wetted mold and is then "served very cold" is not safer than one eaten immediately; it has simply had longer to sit.
- Who is most at riskUncooked egg white in a chilled dessert is the standard caution case for small children, pregnant women, the elderly and anyone immunosuppressed. This is the audience most likely to be handed a soft nursery pudding.
- A tumbler of jellyFor reference when reading the original: a tumbler here means a jelly glass of the period, commonly in the neighbourhood of a cup, though sizes varied. The recipe assumes quince jelly set firm enough to hold a shape.
- QuinceThe note that "any firm jelly will do" is honest. Quince was a common household jelly fruit because it is naturally high in pectin, but the recipe is really about the starch and the beating, not the fruit.
Fairy puddings, snows, and whips belong to a family of inexpensive Victorian and Edwardian desserts that got much of their bulk from air rather than from cream or large quantities of eggs and sugar — the economy is in the beating. A tumbler of jelly, a spoonful or two of cornstarch and a couple of egg whites stretched to fill several molds. The technique depends on cornstarch, a nineteenth-century industrial product that reached American kitchens in quantity after mid-century and came to be used in puddings and blancmanges in place of arrowroot and rice flour. Quince was widely grown and almost never eaten raw; being hard, astringent and very high in pectin, it went into jelly, marmalade and paste, and a jar of it was the sort of thing a household would have on the shelf to be spent on a pudding like this one.