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Lemon Snow
Put one ounce of gelatine in a saucepan with a little water, and place it over the fire until it has dissolved, then add one-half pound of sugar and the juice of six lemons. Stir the mixture and boil it for ten minutes, then strain through a jelly-bag into a basin. Whip the whites of four eggs to a stiff froth, and when the jelly is cold and is commencing to thicken, mix them in and whisk until light. Leave the pudding to get cold, garnish with ratafias, and serve.
This is a snow pudding: a lemon jelly whipped up with raw egg white until it holds air. The structure depends on the whites never being cooked, which is exactly the problem.
- The whites are never heatedThe gelatine syrup is boiled, but it is strained, cooled and left to begin setting before the four whipped whites go in. Nothing in the method brings the egg above room temperature, and the finished pudding is then held cold for hours. Raw shell egg carries a risk of Salmonella, and a sweet, moist, hand-whisked foam sitting at cool-not-cold temperatures is a hospitable place for it.
- Volume works against youFour whites folded through the whole batch of jelly means any contamination in one egg is distributed through every portion, and there is no cooking step afterward to reverse it. Use a current recipe for lemon snow or Bavarian cream if you want to make this kind of dessert.
- An ounce of gelatine is not a modern packetOne ounce is roughly four envelopes of powdered gelatine. Nineteenth-century gelatine is generally reckoned to have been less consistent and weaker in setting power than today's standardised product, which may be why historic quantities read as high; the recipe does not say which form is meant.
- The juice of six lemonsLemons vary a great deal, and six might give anywhere from two-thirds of a cup to a cup and a half; the recipe gives no volume.
- Boiling the syrup ten minutesThe recipe boils the syrup for ten minutes and then strains it through a jelly-bag. Modern gelatine is degraded rather than improved by prolonged boiling and loses setting power.
- RatafiasSmall, hard, bitter-almond-flavoured macaroons, sold in Britain as ratafia biscuits and used here purely as a garnish. Amaretti are the closest thing on most shelves.
Snow puddings — a lemon or wine jelly beaten with egg white until opaque and light — were a fixture of English and American dessert cookery through the whole nineteenth century, and called for little more than sugar, lemons, a few eggs and gelatine. Their spread tracks the arrival of reliable commercial gelatine in the second half of the century, which put a set jelly within reach of a cook who did not want to spend a day boiling calves' feet. Oscar Tschirky, ma tre d'h tel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, compiled his enormous Cook Book in 1896, and the dessert chapters lean heavily on this sort of cold, moulded, whisked confection. The garnish of ratafias is a bought biscuit doing the decorative work.