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Fruit Jelly Floats
Good firm jellies of fruits can be beaten partially light after the manner of the gelatine kinds preceding, and whipped whites of eggs can be beaten in as a finish. Take quince, peach, currant, or other jelly that is hard enough to cut with a knife and warm it sufficiently to beat. Set the bowl containing it in a pan of ice water to cool it while beating, and to 1/2 pint of jelly allow 1/2 pound of powdered sugar. When light add the whipped whites of 6 eggs. Beat 5 minutes more Keep cold Serve in saucers of cream.
Why do fifteen families requires as many persons to do the marketing for them, trusting to the butchers and bakers and others for the weights and measures, and trusting to luck for the quality of things bought because the qualities are too small to be worth a person's attention, when, if all were together, one buyer could buy better for them all at once, aided by acquired judgment and knowledge of goods and prices, and scales, weights, measures and books?
This is a raw-egg foam: six whipped whites are folded into warmed jelly, kept cold, and served straight away with cream. Nothing in the method ever reaches a temperature that would make the whites safe, so the recipe cannot be recommended as printed.
- The whites are never cookedWarmed jelly at beating temperature is nowhere near hot enough to pasteurise egg white, and the mixture is then deliberately chilled over ice water and held cold. Salmonella in raw or lightly warmed whites is the specific risk, and it is a real one in a dish built on six of them to half a pint of jelly.
- Volume magnifies the problemSix whites beaten into half a pint of jelly makes a large, aerated bowl, and anything shell-borne is distributed through the whole batch. A current recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue base should be used instead.
- Cream adds a second cold-holdThe saucers of cream are unheated as well, so the finished plate is two uncooked animal products held at serving temperature. Nothing downstream corrects it.
- Half a pint of jellyFor reference when reading the proportions: half a pint is one cup, and half a pound of powdered sugar is roughly one and three-quarter to two cups, sifted. The sugar-to-jelly ratio here is very high by modern taste even setting the egg question aside.
- "Beaten partially light"The jelly is warmed only until it will take a whisk, not melted to liquid; the recipe sets the bowl in ice water to keep it cool while beating, which would also help it hold its set as air goes in. This appears to be what the author means by "after the manner of the gelatine kinds preceding" -- a fruit-jelly whip rather than a true mousse.
- Which jelliesQuince, peach and currant are named as examples, but the requirement the recipe itself states is any jelly "hard enough to cut with a knife." A soft or runny modern preserve will not hold air at all, and no amount of beating will save it.
Fruit jelly "floats" and "whips" belong to a long line of nineteenth-century dishes that turned a preserved fruit jelly back into a dessert by beating air into it, the sweet cousins of the snow puddings and Spanish creams. The appeal was practical: a well-made jelly kept all winter on a pantry shelf, and a bowl of it plus a few eggs produced something that looked like a company dessert without a trip to market. That the entry runs straight into a paragraph about cooperative buying — fifteen families and fifteen separate shoppers, all at the mercy of the butcher's scales — is characteristic of this book, which treats costing, weighing and purchasing as part of the craft rather than an afterthought. Powdered sugar in this period generally meant sugar ground fine at the shop or in the kitchen, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today.