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Soda Water Jellies
Having a number of different colors and flavors prepared as above, fill a sufficient number of tall thin stem glasses with them, but not quite to the top, and set them in a cold place to harden. Make the foam for the tops by beating a pint of jelly with a wire egg whisk in a pan set in ice water and when it is partly frothed whip up the whites of 3 eggs. add them to the jelly and continue beating them together a minute or two. Then pile the white froth thus made on top of the glasses. Keep them in a cold place to solidify, and serve them very cold. These make a fine appearance in pyramidal form on a set table.
This is the finishing instruction for a set of coloured gelatin jellies made earlier in the book, and it depends on an uncooked egg-white foam that is never heated at any stage.
- Why the cautionThe whites of three eggs are whipped raw into cool jelly and served as-is. Nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the finished glasses then sit at cool temperatures for hours while setting, which is exactly the condition a lightly acidic sweet gel does not protect against. A current recipe for a gelatin foam should be used instead.
- "Jelly" hereThis means a sweetened, flavoured gelatin jelly of the kind prepared in the preceding recipes of the book, not preserved fruit jelly. The pint used for the foam is liquid but chilled, on the point of setting.
- A pintIf the book is American, a pint is 16 fl oz, or two cups, rather than the imperial 20 oz.
- "A cold place"Most likely a cellar, larder or ice chest rather than a refrigerator. It is a setting instruction, not a food-safety one, and does not make an uncooked egg foam keep.
- The pan in ice waterBeating jelly over ice is what makes it hold air at all: it thickens the gelatin as it aerates so the froth does not collapse back into liquid. Once it sets in the bowl it cannot be re-whipped without melting it down again.
- Tall thin stem glassesThe jellies are filled short of the rim, as the recipe directs, so the white foam can be piled above the glass.
- The "pyramidal form"This refers to the arrangement of the filled glasses on the table, not to the shape of each individual serving.
Soda water jellies are associated with the soda fountain, where druggists' fountains and hotel confectioners shared both flavourings and clientele. The name appears to point at the fountain's syrup rack rather than at any carbonation in the dish itself: the same bottled essences and colourings that flavoured a glass of soda water could be set with gelatin and served in similar stemware. Cheap sheet and powdered gelatin, commercially available in America from the middle of the nineteenth century, is what made such things routine work for a pastry cook rather than a day's labour boiling calves' feet. Whipped-jelly foams of this kind appear in British books of the period under names such as "snow", and the instruction to bank the finished glasses in a pyramid fits a period of table service in which height and repetition mattered in a dessert display.