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Russian Jelly
2 cups boiling water cup orange juice cup grape juice 3 egg whites Soak gelatine in cold water. Boil sugar and boiling water ten minutes. Add soaked gelatine and fruit juice. Strain, add egg whites, and beat with Dover egg beater until cold. Serve with beaten cream, sweetened and flavored. 2 tablespoons gelatine 1 cup cold water ½ cup boiling water 14 cups sugar
This is a whipped gelatine "snow" of the type common in American cookbooks around 1900, and it depends on uncooked egg white for its volume. The transcription is also badly damaged, which compounds the problem.
- The egg whites are never cookedThe sugar syrup is boiled, but it is diluted with the cup of cold water the gelatine was soaked in and with cold fruit juice, then strained before the whites go in — and the whole is then beaten until cold. Whatever residual warmth remains is nowhere near enough to pasteurise the whites, and beating aerates them rather than heating them, so Salmonella on the shell or in the egg is never brought anywhere near the 160F that would destroy it.
- No further heat step followsUnlike a boiled custard or a cooked meringue, nothing after this point raises the temperature. The mixture is beaten until cold and served cold with sweetened beaten cream; the recipe gives no moulding or setting instruction. There is no stage at which contamination is addressed. A current recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked base should be used instead.
- The quantities are unreadable"14 cups sugar" is a lost fraction — possibly 1¼ cups, though the figure cannot be recovered with confidence — and the orange and grape juice quantities have lost their fractions entirely. Two boiling-water amounts are given, 2 cups and ½ cup, with no way to tell which belongs to the syrup. Any attempt to reconstruct it is guesswork.
- Gelatine of the periodTwo tablespoons of gelatine soaked in a full cup of cold water reflects products of the period, which varied in setting strength; modern powdered gelatine is graded and standardised, so the original proportions would not translate directly even if the sugar were legible.
- Dover egg beaterThe Dover was a well-known American hand-cranked rotary beater, named often enough in turn-of-the-century recipes to be recognised by brand. The instruction assumes sustained cranking to bring a warm gelatine foam down to cold; no time is given.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, as a general household cookbook that also happened to promote its cocoa — a common publishing strategy for food firms of the era, alongside Royal Baking Powder and Knox Gelatine. Whipped fruit gelatines like this one belong to a large family of Victorian and Edwardian "snow" and "sponge" desserts, in which egg white beaten into setting jelly doubles its bulk and turns it opaque and pale; the same technique produces snow pudding and lemon sponge. The label "Russian" seems often to have been applied loosely in American and British cookbooks of the period to creams and jellies served cold in moulds, frequently with little traceable connection to Russia beyond a fashionable name. Grape juice in the ingredient list points to the period as well: commercially bottled unfermented grape juice had become widely available in American groceries by the early 1900s and turns up often in temperance-minded dessert recipes.