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Floating Island
1 quart milk 4 eggs 4 tablespoons sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup currant jelly 2 teaspoons vanilla or almond extract Scald milk but do not boil; beat yolks of eggs; stir in sugar and salt; add gradually the hot milk, mixing well. Cook slowly in saucepan until mixture begins to thicken, stirring continually. When cold, flavor and put into glass dish. Make meringue of whites whipped until dry, and into which jelly has been beaten, a teaspoon at a time, and heap on top; or drop meringue with tablespoon on top of custard and put small pieces of jelly in center of each "island." Chill and serve.
A stirred custard under a jelly-tinted meringue. The custard is cooked; the meringue in this version never is, and that is where the recipe fails for a modern kitchen.
- Why the cautionThe meringue here is raw egg white beaten with jelly and heaped straight onto cold custard, then chilled and served. Nothing brings those whites to a safe temperature, and the dish is held cold rather than baked or poached. Use a current recipe if you want to make floating island.
- What older versions did insteadThe classical treatment poaches spoonfuls of meringue in the hot milk before that milk is turned into the custard, so the whites set. This version skips that step entirely, which is what separates it from the safer traditional method.
- Scald milk but do not boilScalding means heating to about 180F, when the surface shivers and a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge. Boiling gives the custard a cooked-milk flavour and makes curdling more likely once the yolks go in.
- The custard hinge"Begins to thicken" is the whole instruction and it is a narrow window: the mixture coats a spoon at roughly 175-180F and scrambles not far above that. Low heat, constant stirring, and a bowl to pour into the moment it thickens.
- QuantitiesOne quart of milk to four yolks and four tablespoons of sugar makes a thin pouring custard, not a set one, which suits a dish where the meringue sits on top of it.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly was a common larder item and supplies both colour and tartness. The recipe directs that it be beaten in a teaspoon at a time, which would help avoid deflating the whites.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a quart of milk with the meringue on top would stretch to roughly eight small glasses.
Floating island is one of the long-lived English dessert names, and by the nineteenth century it had drifted a long way from its origins. Eighteenth-century English "floating islands" were elaborate constructions of whipped cream and syllabub piled over wine or cream, sometimes decorated with sweetmeats; the French oeufs a la neige and ile flottante, poached meringue on vanilla custard, gradually took over the name in Anglo-American cookbooks. What appears here is the simplified household descendant: a stirred boiled custard, a meringue lightened with jelly for colour, and no oven or poaching pan required.