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Macaroon Pudding
One package minute gelatine dissolved in one-half cup boiling water. Make a custard of one pint milk, 1½ cups sugar, yolks of 3 eggs, 1/2 tsp. salt. Cook in double boiler till it thickens, then add gelatine and let cool. When cold, add 1/2 cup finely cut macaroons and the beaten whites of three eggs. Flavor custard with vanilla and the whites with lemon. Beat all together and set in a cold place. Serve with whipped cream.
— Elsie Tunison Snow
This is a gelatine-set custard cream, and the problem sits in the last third of the method: three egg whites go in raw and nothing afterwards heats them.
- The raw whites are the faultOnly the yolks are cooked, in the double boiler. The beaten whites are folded into an already cooled custard and the pudding is then simply chilled, so the whites never approach the 160F at which Salmonella is destroyed. A chilled, high-moisture, low-acid dairy dessert is also a good growth medium if it sits out during setting or serving. Use a current recipe for a chilled gelatine custard rather than this one.
- "Minute gelatine" is not a modern packageEarly granulated gelatines were sold in packages of varying strength, and one package here cannot be assumed to equal a modern quarter-ounce envelope. The recipe gives no weight, so the set is genuinely unknown.
- "Set in a cold place"For a household of this period that meant a cellar, an icebox or a window ledge, temperatures well above modern refrigeration. That vagueness is part of why the raw-white version is not reproducible safely.
- Macaroons meant almond macaroonsMacaroons here most likely means the almond kind -- crisp almond-and-egg-white biscuits, dry enough to be cut fine and to soften into the custard without collapsing it -- rather than the French macaron, though coconut macaroons were also current by this date.
- The sugar is very highA cup and a half of sugar to a pint of milk is far sweeter than a modern stirred custard, and the macaroons add more. Period puddings were sweet, but this figure is at the top of the range.
- Two flavourings, deliberatelyTwo flavourings -- The recipe flavours the custard with vanilla and the whites with lemon. Whether this is deliberate or a quirk of the contributor cannot be told from the page.
Packaged granulated gelatine, sold in pre-measured envelopes from the late nineteenth century onward, is what put desserts like this into ordinary church-supper cookbooks; before it, a cook wanting a moulded cream had to clarify calf's-foot stock or buy expensive sheet isinglass. The result is a Bavarian-cream idea — custard lightened with whipped whites and stiffened with gelatine — brought within reach of a household with an icebox and no pastry training. Crushed almond macaroons were one way to give such a cream body and flavour, a habit often said to descend from English and French charlotte and trifle cookery, where stale sweet biscuits were never wasted. The signed attribution is typical of fundraising collections of recipes contributed by name by the women of a class or congregation, which is why the measurements assume knowledge the page does not supply.