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Snow Pudding
two teacups of white sugar, the grated peel and juice of two lemons; strain into a deep dish to cool; when it commences to jelly, add to it the whites of four well-beaten eggs, beat until the dish is full, put in molds and place in a cool place.
Two things stand in the way here: the text as printed is incomplete, and the finished pudding is never heated at any point.
- Raw egg whites, never cookedThe whites of four eggs are beaten into a cooling jelly and set in a cold place. Nothing in the method brings them above refrigerator temperature, so any Salmonella present in the shell eggs survives into the finished dessert. Whipping and chilling do not reduce that risk.
- Long standing at cool temperaturesA sweetened, egg-enriched gel held in "a cool place" — a nineteenth-century larder, not a 40F refrigerator — sits in the range where bacteria multiply. The recipe's own instruction to mould and set means the mixture stands for some time before it is eaten.
- The recipe is missing its setting agentAs printed the list begins mid-sentence: there is sugar, lemon peel and juice, and nothing to make it "commence to jelly." The original almost certainly opened with a quantity of gelatine or isinglass dissolved in boiling water, which has dropped out of the text. Without it the instruction to strain into a deep dish and wait for it to set cannot work.
- A teacup is not a measuring cupA teacup in this period is smaller than a modern 8 fl oz cup, but sources vary — anywhere from about 4 to 6 fl oz — so two teacups of sugar cannot be converted with any precision. This matters chiefly because the sugar quantity is one of the few figures the fragment actually gives.
- What to make insteadSnow pudding is still worth making, but use a current recipe that either cooks the base as a custard or specifies pasteurised egg whites, and that states the gelatine quantity and the chilling temperature.
Snow pudding — also called snow jelly or lemon snow — was, by most accounts, a fixture of American household cookery from roughly the 1870s through the 1920s: a lemon gelatine whipped with egg whites until it doubled and turned opaque white, chilled in a mould, and served with a soft custard sauce. Its appeal was economy and effect. Gelatine appears to have become cheap and reliable once packaged granulated brands reached the grocer's shelf in the late nineteenth century, replacing the tedious business of boiling calves' feet or shaving isinglass, and a few cents' worth of it plus two lemons and four egg whites produced something that looked like a great deal more. This is the sort of dish a new housekeeper was expected to be able to put on the table for company without a cook, without an oven and without much money. The instruction to "beat until the dish is full" is the whole trick, and is often said to be the reason for the name.