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Orange Snow
Soak one ounce of gelatine in three gills of cold water for four hours, then add to it the grated rind of half a lemon, the grated rind of an orange, the strained juice of one lemon and four oranges, and eight ounces of powdered white sugar, stir well together, and let the mixture stand for an hour. Add a pint of boiling water and continue stirring till clear; then strain it through a coarse cloth and wring it thoroughly. Beat the whites of four eggs to a stiff froth, and when the liquid is quite cool whisk them into it by degrees, and continue whisking till quite thick and white. Wet the inside of a mould with cold water, and pour the snow into it. Let it stand in a cool place for eight hours at least before turning it out, then pile it up on a glass dish, and garnish it round with sweet biscuits.
This is a Victorian-style whipped jelly, and the problem with it is structural rather than incidental: the egg whites go in raw and never come near heat again.
- Raw egg white is the whole methodThe boiling water is added to the gelatine long before the eggs; by the time the whites are whisked in, the liquid is specifically "quite cool." Nothing afterwards heats the mixture, and it then sits for eight hours in a cool place. Four raw whites are eaten uncooked.
- Why that matters nowSalmonella can be present in and on shell eggs, and a sweetened gelatine base held for hours at cellar or refrigerator temperature does nothing to control it. Whisking air through the whites spreads any contamination evenly through the whole mould. Use a current recipe if you want this dessert.
- The gelatine is not a safeguardSetting is a physical process, not a kill step. A firm set gives no indication that the mixture is safe, and the long unrefrigerated "cool place" rest that the recipe calls for makes matters worse rather than better.
- Gills and ouncesFor reading the original: a gill is a quarter-pint, so three gills is about 1.5 cups, and the pint of boiling water is a US pint if you are working from an American printing. An ounce of leaf or powdered gelatine is roughly 28 g, four times a modern envelope, which tells you how firm a Victorian mould was expected to be.
- "Powdered white sugar"In this period the term means finely ground granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Eight ounces is about a cup and an eighth by weight.
- Straining and wringingThe coarse cloth appears to be there to catch undissolved gelatine and the grated zest. Wringing a cloth full of hot syrup is an awkward and scalding job for one person.
Whipped jellies of this kind — a citrus gelatine beaten with egg white until it turns opaque and holds a mould — were a fixture of nineteenth-century dessert tables, appearing under names like snow, sponge and whip depending on the cookbook. They belong to the era when commercial sheet and powdered gelatine, increasingly available and affordable over the later nineteenth century, replaced the days-long labour of boiling calves' feet, which put moulded jellies within reach of more households. Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name carried the 1896 Waldorf collection, was assembling a standard repertoire as much as inventing dishes; an orange snow served piled on a glass dish and ringed with sweet biscuits is the kind of light, decorative, make-ahead sweet a large kitchen might want for banquet service. The garnish of "sweet biscuits" would have meant plain crisp cookies of the wafer or ladyfinger sort.