Snow Float
Snow Pudding. Lemon Snow. Lemon Sponge. Mont Blanc, etc, etc or Russian Jelly. 2 quarts of water. 4 ounces scant of gelatine. 2 pounds of sugar. 6 lemons-juice of all, rinds of 2 or 3. 8 whites of eggs. Grate the lemon rinds and squeeze the juice into the sugar in a kettle, add the water and gelatine, set the kettle over the fire and beat the contents frequently till the gelatine is all dissolved, which will be at about the boiling point. Strain it into an ice cream freezer or other vessel set in ice water, and when the jelly has become nearly cold heat it with a wire egg whisk till frothy and almost while. Then whip the whites of eggs firm, stir them in and beat the whole again till it is set, when it will be like snow. Make a yellow custard with a quart of milk, 8 yolks and 4 ounces of sugar, and flavor, and serve it in the saucers with a spoonful of the float, ice cold. Articles like the foregoing come in serviceably when, as so often happens there is no milk to be had, for even the custards to go with them can be made with water.
For a yellow variety of the Russian jelly or gelatine float, when it is just at the boiling point stir in the yolks of 8 or 10 eggs quickly and take the jelly from the fire immediately before they become cooked. Flavor with lemon extract if necessary and beat it up without the addition of white of eggs. Race ginger boiled in the jelly makes another kind. It should be colored with burnt sugar and beaten up like the snow float.
Lemon juice more or less is essential in them all to correct the taste of gelatine.
A spoonful of whipped cream can be served with the floats instead of custard. Snow float that is left over is all ready to be boiled and run through the jelly bag to make wine jelly of the clearest for the next day. The white of egg in it clarifies it and then its strained out.
Why do fifteen families, numbering seventy-five souls, have fifteen very poor cooks preparing fifteen very poor dinners over fifteen different fires when, if they were all together, two skillful cooks with a helper and a man in the yard and two fires could prepare a most excellent dinner at less cost for them all?
A large-format hotel dessert: lemon gelatin whipped to a foam with raw egg whites and served in a pool of thin custard. The proportions are sound but two steps in the method are no longer acceptable practice, and the notes below flag them before anything else.
- The raw whites are the problemEight whipped whites are folded into jelly that has been cooled to "nearly cold" and are never heated again. Nothing in the finished float reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, and the dish is then held cold and eaten over a day or more. If you want a snow pudding, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue.
- The yolk variation is deliberately undercookedThe yellow version instructs you to stir in eight to ten yolks at the boiling point and pull the kettle off "immediately before they become cooked." That is an instruction to stop short of coagulation on purpose. It carries the same hazard as the raw whites.
- Leftovers reboiled the next dayThe closing suggestion — hold the unused float overnight, boil it, and strain it through a jelly bag for wine jelly — assumes cold storage that no longer describes a domestic kitchen. A sugar-and-gelatin foam containing raw egg is a good growth medium, and while the later boiling would kill most bacteria, it will not undo spoilage or any toxin already formed while it stood.
- Gelatine strength has changedFour scant ounces to two quarts of liquid is roughly sixteen modern quarter-ounce envelopes, which would set stone hard today. Nineteenth-century sheet and shred gelatine was much weaker and less consistent than modern powder, and a whipped jelly needs a firmer set than a moulded one. Treat the quantity as unconvertible rather than guessing at it.
- Race ginger"Race" ginger is whole unground root — the word is usually traced to a Romance root-word (Old French rais, from Latin radix) — simmered in the liquid and strained out, not powdered ginger. The burnt sugar called for as colouring is caramel darkened almost to bitterness, used here purely for tint.
- Why the lemon is not optionalThe line "lemon juice more or less is essential in them all to correct the taste of gelatine" is the most useful sentence on the page. Period gelatine carried a distinct animal flavour, and acid masks it. Even with modern gelatine the acid keeps a sweet whipped jelly from tasting flat.
- ScaleThe batch is two quarts of jelly before whipping, plus a full quart of custard to accompany it. This is a service quantity rather than a household one.
Snow pudding under its many aliases — lemon sponge, Mont Blanc, Russian jelly — was one of the great cheap desserts of the late nineteenth-century American hotel and boarding-house kitchen, and this entry says why outright: it needs no milk. Gelatine had by then dropped from a luxury requiring hours of boiling calves' feet to a packaged product a pastry cook could buy by the pound, and a confectioner with sugar, lemons, eggs and water could turn out a dessert that looked like whipped cream at a fraction of the cost. The list of interchangeable names is itself evidence of a trade in which the same preparation was re-lettered on the menu depending on the colouring and the flavour; the yellow yolk version and the ginger version here are the same jelly in different clothes. The closing aside about fifteen families and fifteen poor cooks is not a stray remark either — communal cooking and the economics of the large kitchen were live arguments in American domestic writing from the 1860s onward.</p>