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Lemon Foam M
1 cup water 2/3 cup sugar White of 1 egg 1 lemon 1 level tablespoon cornstarch Dissolve the cornstarch in a little water; add the remainder of the water and the sugar and cook rapidly for three minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from the fire; stir in the white of the egg, beaten stiff, and the juice of the lemon. Turn into molds; let stand for twelve hours and serve. 1 cup milk
A cornstarch-thickened lemon sponge of the sort that filled the dessert pages of nearly every American cookbook around 1900. As printed here it is both incomplete and, by current standards, unsafe.
- Why it failsThe stiffly beaten egg white is stirred in after the pan comes off the fire and is never cooked again. A single white folded into a small quantity of thickened syrup will not hold a pasteurizing temperature, and the mixture then stands twelve hours before it is eaten. That is raw egg white with a long hold time; use a current recipe for lemon sponge or lemon snow if you want to make one.
- The twelve-hour standThe original does not say where the molds should stand, cold or otherwise. Written as it is, a reader today could reasonably leave them on the counter overnight, which is the part of the method that turns a low risk into a real one.
- No water quantity is givenThe cornstarch is dissolved "in a little water" and then "the remainder of the water" is added, but no total is ever stated. The page as printed simply omits it.
- The stray "1 cup milk"This hangs at the end with no instruction attached. It is most likely stray text from an adjoining recipe or a typesetting slip rather than an ingredient of the foam itself.
- Cooking the cornstarchThree minutes at a rapid boil with constant stirring is in line with period instructions for cooking out the raw starch taste.
- Molds"Turn into molds" means individual cups or small tin molds; period practice was to rinse them in cold water so a set foam slips out, though this recipe does not say so.
- Section placementIf it does sit under Canning and Preserving, that is an artifact of the book's arrangement rather than any preserving function. Nothing here keeps.
Lemon sponge, lemon snow and lemon foam are overlapping names for a family of Victorian and Edwardian desserts: a clear acid-and-sugar base set with cornstarch, gelatin or isinglass, lightened with beaten egg white and turned out of a mold. They were cheap and looked more elaborate than they were, and lemons -- shipped from Sicily and, later, California -- were among the few reliable fresh acids available year-round in a Northern kitchen. Cornstarch versions like this one became common as commercial cornstarch established itself in the American grocery over the second half of the nineteenth century, and starch manufacturers promoted such recipes in their own pamphlets. The loose-leaf format, with each recipe on its own detachable sheet, was a selling point of the period.