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Gelatine Pudding
Put a quarter of an ounce of gelatine in half a teacupful of cold water, let it remain until soft and then add boiling water to make the quantity up to half a pint. Beat up the yolks of three eggs in a basin, mix in three tablespoonfuls of sugar and a little salt to make a custard. Pour this into a double boiler, add one pint of boiling milk and boil until it thickens. Pass the gelatine water through a fine strainer into the double boiler with the custard, and add a teaspoonful of vanilla extract and the whites of three eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Dip six small moulds into cold water, pour in the mixture and pack them in pounded ice to harden. Turn them out of the moulds on a glass dish, and serve with wine or other sweet sauce.
A moulded vanilla bavarian in all but name, written for a kitchen with an icehouse rather than a refrigerator. The custard step is the one that decides whether it works.
- Do not actually boil the custard"Boil until it thickens" means the water in the outer pan boils, not the custard. Yolks curdle above roughly 180F; cook to the point where the mixture coats a spoon and no further.
- The gelatineA quarter of an ounce is about 7 g, which is one standard envelope of powdered gelatine, or roughly three to four sheets. Modern gelatine is sold to a standardised bloom strength, so the set may differ from what the original product gave; 7 g to a pint of milk plus a cup of water is a light set in any case.
- Old measuresA teacupful was not a fixed measure, being reckoned anywhere from a gill to half a pint; half a teacupful of cold water is somewhere around a third of a cup. The finished gelatine liquid comes to half a pint, one US cup. Three tablespoonfuls of sugar is modest for a pint of milk plus a cup of water, and the recipe finishes with a sweet sauce.
- The raw whitesThe recipe adds the stiff whites to the custard in the double boiler and the mixture is then chilled, so they are not reliably brought to a cooking temperature. If the dessert is for children, elderly or pregnant eaters, use pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue.
- Pounded icePacking the moulds in crushed ice is simply refrigeration. Four hours in the fridge, or overnight, gives a cleaner set.
- StrainingPassing the gelatine through a fine strainer catches undissolved grains; it is worth straining the finished custard too, before folding in the whites.
- UnmouldingDipping the moulds in cold water first, as instructed, keeps the pudding from sticking. To turn out, dip the outside in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a chilled dish.
- Yield and sauceSix small moulds, so six servings of about half a cup. Period wine sauces ranged from a simple sweetened butter-and-wine sauce to an egg-thickened sherry or Madeira sabayon; a fruit puree does the same job.
Moulded gelatine desserts were a mark of an ambitious kitchen for much of the nineteenth century, when gelatine might be extracted at home from calves' feet, though commercial sheet gelatine was widely available by the end of the century. Pre-granulated packaged gelatine, generally credited to Charles Knox's business in Johnstown, New York, in the 1890s, is what turned a laborious set piece into something a cook could do on a weekday, and recipes like this one give the quantity by weight: "a quarter of an ounce of gelatine." Oscar Tschirky's book gathers a great many of these plain, sturdy sweets alongside the Waldorf's showpiece cookery; a vanilla custard set in six small moulds and turned out onto a glass dish was the kind of dessert a hotel could plate quickly and a home reader could copy exactly.