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Lady-fingers
White of 1 egg A little salt Add a teaspoonful of cold water to the gelatine and soak ten minutes. Melt over hot water, and add with the sugar to the grape-juice. Stir until the sugar dissolves. Set in a pan of cracked ice, and when it begins to harden around the edge of the bowl, beat with a Dover beater until the mass becomes thickened. Then fold into it the stiffly beaten white of one egg, to which have been added the salt, lemon-juice, and one tablespoonful of sugar while beating. Keep on ice until very cold and thick. When ready to serve, unmold in a glass dish in a border of lady-fingers.
1 tablespoonful gela- 1 cup grape-juice
This is a grape-juice "sponge" — a whipped gelatine set in a mold and ringed with lady-fingers — and the page has been mangled in transcription, with the ingredient list broken off and scattered. More importantly, the beaten egg white is folded in raw and the dessert is never heated.
- The raw egg whiteThe white of one egg goes into a cold gelatine mixture and is served straight from the ice, so nothing in the dish ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Fresh, clean shells are no protection; the organism can be present inside an intact egg. A current recipe, built around pasteurized whites, should be used instead.
- The ingredient list is incompleteWhat survives is "1 tablespoonful gelatine," "1 cup grape-juice," white of 1 egg and a little salt. The quantity of sugar for the base and of lemon juice are missing entirely, and the tablespoon of sugar beaten into the white is the only sugar actually specified. There is no way to reconstruct the proportions honestly from this page.
- Gelatine by the spoonA tablespoonful of granulated gelatine is in the neighbourhood of a modern quarter-ounce envelope, though not exactly, and period gelatines varied in strength. It is one more reason the amounts here cannot be taken at face value.
- Dover beaterThe Dover was the best-known American rotary hand beater, patented in the 1870s and widely sold thereafter. It corresponds to a hand mixer or a whisk, and its appearance in a recipe simply signals that the mixture is to be whipped rather than stirred.
- Setting on cracked iceThe technique — chilling the bowl over ice until the gelatine thickens at the rim, then beating it to a foam — is sound and still used. It is the whipping, not the sugar, that gives a sponge its volume. It does nothing, however, to make raw egg white safe.
- Lady-fingersDespite the title, no lady-fingers are made here. They are used ready-made, stood upright around the unmolded sponge in the manner of a charlotte.
Grape-juice desserts multiplied in American cookbooks after unfermented bottled grape juice became a commercial product in the later nineteenth century — the trade is generally traced to Dr. Thomas Welch and his son, who promoted it as a sacramental and temperance alternative to wine. By the 1900s it was widely available, and desserts of this kind put it to use: the last of a bottle, thickened with gelatine and whipped into a "sponge" or "snow." These whipped gelatine dishes were the light end of the period's dessert repertoire, cousins to Bavarian creams and charlottes but without the cream or the custard, and the ring of lady-fingers is a borrowing from the charlotte russe that turns a bowl of set fruit juice into something presentable at table.