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Snow Pudding
2 tablespoons granulated gelatine 2 tablespoons cold water cup boiling water 1 cup sugar cup lemon juice 3 egg whites Soak the gelatine in cold water; dissolve in boiling water; add sugar and lemon juice. Stir till mixture thickens, then add the beaten whites of eggs and continue beating until stiff enough to drop. Mold, chill, and serve with custard sauce. 1 pound pulled figs 2 cups water 1/4 cup sugar
A classic gelatine snow pudding, but as printed it depends on raw egg white that is never brought to any temperature at all, and two of its measurements have lost their fractions in the original typesetting.
- Why it fails: uncooked whitesThe whites go into a gelatine base that has already cooled and thickened, and the pudding is then only chilled. Nothing in the method brings the egg to a temperature that would address Salmonella, and the sugar and lemon do not compensate. Use a current recipe if you want a snow pudding.
- The custard sauce compounds itThe custard sauce — The sauce is not given on this page, but a soft custard poured around snow pudding is a stirred egg custard, judged by eye when it coats a spoon rather than by thermometer. It may or may not reach a safe temperature, and here it accompanies an egg preparation that is not heated at all.
- Measurements lost in printing"cup boiling water" and "cup lemon juice" both began as fractions that dropped out of the text. Comparable period recipes commonly use about a cup of boiling water and about a quarter cup of lemon juice, though quantities vary; the amounts as printed here are genuinely unreadable.
- Granulated gelatineTwo tablespoons of granulated gelatine is roughly two and a half modern quarter-ounce envelopes, though older gelatines varied in strength and were not standardised to today's bloom ratings.
- The stray figsThe last line — 1 pound pulled figs, 2 cups water, 1/4 cup sugar — belongs to the following recipe in the book, not to this one. "Pulled figs" appears to have been a grade of dried figs shaped or flattened by hand rather than pressed.
- "Stiff enough to drop""Stir till mixture thickens" — The hinge of the method: the gelatine must be cooled and syrupy before the whites go in, or it stays liquid and the beaten foam collapses. The finished mass is then beaten until "stiff enough to drop." No timings are given for either stage.
Snow pudding was one of the most widely printed American desserts of the late nineteenth century, a lemon jelly whipped with egg white until it turned opaque and light — hence the name, as is usually explained — and almost invariably served with a soft custard sauce poured around it. It belongs to the moment when packaged granulated gelatine became a cheap pantry staple and displaced the laborious home boiling of calves' feet and isinglass; recipes that once took a day became an afternoon's chilling. Its appearance in a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook is a reminder of what those volumes were: Lowney's, like Walter Baker & Co., published general household cookbooks that carried a full range of standard dishes alongside the chocolate recipes the company actually wanted to sell. The dish also shows how freely Victorian and Edwardian kitchens used raw egg white as a lightening agent, a practice that persisted in print for decades and has since been abandoned.