Peach Snow
Soak 1/2 of a box of gelatine in 1 cupful of cold water until soft. Boil together for five minutes 1 cupful of sugar and 1 cupful of water, take from the fire and add the gelatine. Stir until dissolved, strain and add 1 1/2 cupfuls of peach pulp, prepared by rubbing the pared peaches through a fine sieve. Set aside, stirring occasionally until the mixture is quite thick. Whip the whites of 4 eggs to a stiff froth, add by degrees the jelly mixture, and continue to whip until the whole mass is very stiff. Pour into a mold wet in cold water, and set on ice until firm enough to turn out.
A gelatin "snow" of the sort that filled American dessert chapters once packaged granulated gelatine became cheap. The structure is sound, but the eggs in it are never cooked, and a few of the measurements need reading carefully before you judge the recipe at all.
- Why this one fails todayThe four egg whites are whipped raw and folded into a gelatin syrup that has already been taken from the fire and left to cool and thicken. Nothing in the method brings them near a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the finished mold then sits on ice for hours, which preserves any contamination rather than removing it. If you want a peach snow, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue.
- Half a box of gelatineGranulated gelatine was sold by the box; the familiar modern box holds four quarter-ounce envelopes to the ounce, so half a box is usually read as about two envelopes, though period box sizes varied and the equivalence is approximate. Sheet gelatine and flavored dessert powders are not interchangeable with it.
- The garbled quantity"1/2 cupfuls of peach pulp" is a typesetting casualty; the plural "cupfuls" points to a dropped digit, most likely 1 1/2. The figure as printed cannot be trusted.
- Peach pulpRubbing pared peaches through a fine sieve gives a thin, fresh purée with no cooking and no added acid, which is why the syrup carries all the sugar. A blender produces a frothier, paler pulp than the sieve does.
- "Set on ice"The original assumes an icebox or a packed ice chest, not a refrigerator. Allow enough time on ice for a mold this size to firm sufficiently to turn out.
Snow puddings — gelatin lightened with beaten whites until it holds a peak — were a fixture of American dessert tables by the later nineteenth century, and their spread is generally credited to the arrival of granulated gelatine sold by the box. Before that, cooks extracted their own gelatin from calves' feet or isinglass, laborious work that made jellied desserts a comparatively ambitious undertaking; the packaged product made them far easier for an ordinary household to attempt. Peaches suited the form: cheap and abundant in season, soft enough to sieve raw, and pale enough that the whipped whites brought the mass close to the near-white color the name promises. Folding fruit-flavored jelly into beaten whites is a relative of the methods behind Spanish cream and Bavarian cream, without the expense of cream.