Home › Honey, Ices and Gelatines › Gelatine Desserts
Gelatine Desserts
1/2 Cup Honey 1 Teaspoon Gelatine 1/2 Cup Cold Water 1/2 Cup Boiling Water Whites 2 Eggs 1 Teaspoon Vanilla 1 Teaspoon Lemon Extract Dissolve gelatine in the usual way, heating it over a teakettle until thoroughly dissolved. Cool, but do not chill; stir in the honey, and add to the whites of the eggs beaten very light, a few spoonfuls at a time, beating constantly. Divide into 2 parts: to one part add a color and flavor with vanilla, about 1 teaspoon; to the other part add 1 teaspoon lemon extract. Mold in layers, adding nuts to one part and maraschino cherries to the other. Serve with or without whipped cream.
This is a gelatine sponge built on raw egg white, and the whites are never heated at any stage — the reason it cannot be recommended today is structural rather than a matter of adjusting times.
- The whites are never cookedThe gelatine is dissolved over a teakettle and then deliberately cooled "but do not chill" before the honey and whites go in. Nothing in the method brings the egg white to a temperature that would kill Salmonella; the gelatine sets by chilling, not by cooking. A current recipe using pasteurised egg white or a cooked meringue base should be used instead.
- Honey does not sterilise anythingHoney is inhospitable to bacteria at full strength, but half a cup diluted into a cup of water and two egg whites is no longer an antimicrobial environment. It contributes nothing to safety here.
- Chilled and heldA moulded gelatine dessert sits for hours before it is unmoulded, and may then stand at room temperature on a sideboard while guests are served. Those are poor holding conditions for a mixture containing raw egg white, though how often such desserts actually caused illness at the time is not documented.
- Gelatine of the period"One teaspoon gelatine" cannot be assumed to match a modern envelope of powdered gelatine, which is about 2 1/4 teaspoons; the recipe does not say what form of gelatine is meant. The original quantity is genuinely ambiguous and would need testing even if the dish were otherwise sound.
- "Add a color"The instruction to tint one layer presumably assumes the bottled colourings then sold for household use, which could include coal-tar dyes that would not all meet later food-grade standards. The book gives no indication of what was in the bottle.
Gelatine sponges like this one belong to the period when packaged gelatine had become cheap and reliable enough for everyday cooks and before raw egg was a general worry. The trick of beating a cooling gelatine solution into stiff whites produces a pale, aerated mixture that holds its shape without cream or ice — hence the family of dishes called snows, sponges and whips that fill the dessert chapters of American household books from the late nineteenth century onward. The honey here serves as sweetener and, plausibly, as a mark of thrift and wholesomeness; the recipe ends by dividing one modest mixture into two colours, two flavours, a layer of nuts and a layer of maraschino cherries, a showy result from staple ingredients. Whipped cream is offered as optional, which suggests the dish was expected to look like a company dessert on its own.