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Snow Pudding
One-third of a box of gelatine put to soak in water to cover it; when soaked, pour 1 pint of boiling water into it, 1 cupful of sugar, and juice of 2 lemons; strain and, when it is cold and begins to set, stir into it the beaten whites of 3 eggs and set away to mold.
Custard sauce to serve with the snow pudding > is made as follows: Heat 1 pint of milk, and when boiling stir in the beaten yolks of 3 eggs, 1/2 cupful of sugar, and flavoring to taste; use care in cooking this.
A standard turn-of-the-century gelatine dessert, but the whipped whites go into the pudding raw and are never heated at any stage. The notes below explain the measurements and the problem.
- Raw egg white is the issueThe three beaten whites are folded into gelatine that has already cooled to setting point, then set to mold and served. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites if you want snow pudding.
- The custard sauce is a separate hazardThe custard sauce is the weak point -- Yolks stirred directly into a pint of boiling milk will scramble at the edges rather than thicken evenly; the original's "use care in cooking this" is the whole of its technique. A modern stirred custard is brought gently to about 175F off a hard boil, which the instruction as printed does not describe.
- "One-third of a box of gelatine"A box of granulated gelatine of this period commonly held about 1 oz, roughly equivalent to four of today's quarter-ounce envelopes, though sizes varied by maker. One-third of a box would therefore be somewhere between one and one and a half of today's envelopes — the fraction is approximate by nature, and the amount was expected to set a pint plus the volume of the whites.
- "1½ cupful of sugar" in the sauceThis is very likely a typesetting error for half a cupful; note the singular "cupful". A pint of milk with three yolks takes 1/3 to 1/2 cup of sugar; a cup and a half would be extremely sweet and would slacken the custard.
- Soaking the gelatineGranulated gelatine is bloomed in cold water to cover, then dissolved by the boiling water poured over it. Older sheet or shred gelatine needed a much longer soak.
- YieldA pint of liquid lightened with three whites molds to roughly six small servings — the volume roughly doubles as the whites are folded in, which is where the "snow" comes from.
Snow pudding belongs to a family of late nineteenth-century gelatine desserts that spread rapidly once granulated gelatine was sold in ready-measured boxes, replacing the long labour of boiling calves' feet for stock. Its appeal to a low-cost cookbook is arithmetical: lemon juice, sugar, water and a few pennies' worth of gelatine, stretched with beaten whites into something that looks like a great deal of dessert, with the leftover yolks turned straight into the accompanying sauce so nothing is wasted. That pairing — a pale foamy mold sitting in a pool of thin boiled custard — was common American fare, and appears under names such as snow pudding, lemon sponge and whipped jelly depending on the book. It is often said to descend from the older English lemon flummeries and syllabubs, aerated with egg white rather than cream.