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Lemon Froth
Soak two ounces of gelatine and dissolve it in one pint of boiling water, then pour in one pint of cold water and add the peels and strained juice of six lemons. Let it stand until it commences to set, then take out the peels and add the whites of a dozen eggs beaten to a stiff froth. When well beaten into the jelly, turn into a glass bowl, garnish with ratafias, and serve.
This is a large-format cold gelatine dessert of the kind Oscar's kitchen sent out by the bowlful, and its structure depends entirely on a dozen raw egg whites that are never heated. That is the problem.
- The whites are never cookedThe gelatine is dissolved in boiling water, but the recipe explicitly waits until the mixture "commences to set" — roughly room temperature or below — before the whites go in. Nothing in the method brings the egg to a temperature that would reduce Salmonella in the shell or on it.
- Twelve eggs, one bowlScale matters with raw egg. A single contaminated white is diluted through the whole bowl and served to a table of people, and the dish then sits at cool-but-not-cold serving temperature while it is eaten. This is the classic profile for an egg-associated outbreak, and it is why commercial kitchens now work from pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue.
- No acid rescueThe juice of six lemons is not a safety step. Lemon juice at this dilution neither pasteurises the whites nor reliably inhibits bacterial growth; it is there for flavour and to keep the froth from tasting flat.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for lemon snow or lemon mousse built on pasteurised egg white, powdered albumen, or a hot-syrup Italian meringue. Do not adapt the instructions above.
- Ratafias, for the recordThe garnish called for is a ratafia biscuit — a small, hard, bitter-almond-flavoured macaroon, sold in Britain into the present day and closest in the American market to a crisp amaretti.
- Gelatine of 1896 is not gelatine of todayTwo ounces of the sheet or shredded gelatine then sold does not correspond cleanly to two ounces of a modern granulated brand; bloom strength was neither standardised nor printed on the package. Any conversion here is guesswork, which is a second reason to work from a modern formula rather than this one.
Lemon froth belongs to a family of nineteenth-century "snow" and "whip" desserts — lemon snow pudding, snow jelly, whipped jelly — in which beaten egg white was folded into a setting gelatine to build up its volume and turn a clear jelly opaque and white. The appeal was theatrical as much as gustatory: served in a cut-glass bowl, it stood tall, held candlelight, and cost very little beyond eggs and lemons. Gelatine is the key to the period. Cooks of the 1830s made jelly by boiling calves' feet for hours and clarifying the result; by the time Oscar Tschirky was running the dining rooms of the Waldorf in the 1890s, packaged sheet and shredded gelatine had made a dish like this far less laborious, and hotel and household books alike filled up with jellies, bavarians, charlottes and froths. The ratafia garnish points back further, to the almond-flavoured English biscuit often said to be named for the cordial it was meant to accompany.