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Lemon Island
Line a serving bowl with lady fingers, separated. Pour a thick lemon filling into the bowl, and sprinkle it with grated cocoanut. Beat the egg-whites left from the lemon filling until very stiff, sweeten them with sugar, and brown in a buttered pie pan in oven. Slip this meringue on top of the pudding to serve.
This is an assembly recipe rather than a formula: it assumes you already have a cooked lemon filling on hand and gives no quantities. Read it as a charlotte-style mold, and work backward from the size of your bowl.
- The hinge: filling thickness"Thick" is doing real work here. A cornstarch-and-yolk lemon filling stiff enough to hold a slice is what keeps the ladyfingers upright; a pourable curd will slump and soak them into paste. Cook the filling until it mounds on the spoon, then cool it to lukewarm before pouring.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For a 1.5-quart bowl, figure on about 24 ladyfingers, a lemon filling built on 4 egg yolks with 1/3 cup cornstarch and roughly 2 cups liquid, and the 4 reserved whites with about 1/2 cup sugar for the meringue.
- Lady fingers, separated"Separated" most likely means the biscuits are pulled apart or split before lining the bowl; ladyfingers were sometimes baked joined and broken apart, though the recipe does not say which is meant. Modern packaged Italian savoiardi come as single dry biscuits and need no preparation; stand them upright around the bowl with the flat sides in.
- CocoanutOld spelling of coconut. Both unsweetened dried and sweetened moist shredded coconut were sold in this period, so today's sweetened flaked coconut may push the dessert sweeter than intended; unsweetened shredded coconut, lightly toasted, is the safer choice.
- Browning the meringueThe recipe gives no temperature or time; a moderate oven, around 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, will set it through and tan the top. Butter the pan generously and use a thin spatula to loosen the edge, or the disc will tear when you slip it off.
- Why bake it separatelyBaking the meringue in its own pan and transferring it keeps the ladyfingers from browning and lets the meringue cool without weeping into the filling. Slide it on just before serving; it will soften fairly quickly once in contact with the filling.
- Chilling and yieldThe recipe says nothing about chilling, but a few hours in the refrigerator will help the filled bowl set firmly enough to spoon out. A 1.5-quart bowl will serve roughly six to eight.
The name recalls floating island, the old dessert of meringue set on custard, which English and American cookbooks had been printing in various forms since the eighteenth century. Here the custard is replaced by a sharp lemon filling and the whole thing is given a wall of ladyfingers, borrowing the construction of a charlotte russe. The arrangement is also thrifty in a way period cooks would have recognized: a lemon filling uses yolks, a meringue uses whites, and the recipe is written so that nothing from either is wasted.