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Floating Island (II)
Mrs. E. S. Miller.
One tumbler of currant jelly, one pint of powdered sugar, five eggs; beat the whites of the eggs very stiff before putting in the jelly; then beat well; add the sugar gradually and beat it perfectly stiff ; chill it thoroughly on the ice and serve in a glass dish half filled with cold milk; cover it with the island in spoonsful standing in peaks. It is to be eaten with cream.
This is a raw-egg-white dessert with no cooking step at any point, which is where it parts company with modern practice. The notes below explain the problem and put the measurements in context.
- The whites are never cookedThe meringue is beaten, chilled and served — nothing in the method brings the egg above refrigerator temperature. Raw shell eggs can carry Salmonella, including inside an intact, clean egg, and chilling suppresses growth but kills nothing. This dish is then held cold on milk and eaten by the spoonful, so any contamination goes straight to the table.
- Sugar and acid are not a safeguardThe heavy sugar load and the acidity of currant jelly are sometimes assumed to make raw whites safe. They do not; neither reaches a level that reliably inactivates pathogens in a soft, high-moisture foam. If you want a floating island, use a current recipe in which the meringue is poached or the whites are heated over a bain-marie.
- "One tumbler"A tumbler in a nineteenth-century American kitchen is a drinking glass of roughly 8 fluid ounces, so about a cup of jelly. Like "a teacup", it is a household vessel rather than a standard measure, and volumes varied from house to house.
- A pint of powdered sugarMeasured by volume, not weight. What a pint weighs depends on which sugar is meant: a pint of modern sifted confectioners' sugar is on the order of half a pound, while a pint of the coarser crushed loaf sugar of the period would be considerably heavier. Either way, against five egg whites this is a very stiff, very sweet meringue, closer to an uncooked royal icing than to a modern soft meringue.
- Powdered sugar then and nowNineteenth-century "powdered" sugar was loaf sugar crushed and sieved fine — a granulated sugar, not today's cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. The two behave differently in a foam, which is part of why the quantity looks extreme by modern eyes.
- The "island"Here the island is the sweetened jelly meringue and the "sea" is plain cold milk, not the boiled custard many readers expect. The instruction to drop it in spoonfuls standing in peaks is the whole visual point of the dish.
Floating island is often associated with the French île flottante and its close relative œufs à la neige, snow eggs, though English cookbooks print "floating island" from the mid-eighteenth century and the relationship between the English and French dishes is not a settled line of descent. Cookbooks of the period print a great many versions, some with poached meringue on a boiled custard, others — like this one — with an uncooked whipped white simply set afloat on cold milk or cream. The currant jelly is a domestic touch: beating it into the whites gave both colour and flavour without recourse to imported flavourings. The Home Cook Book, compiled from contributions by named local women, is characteristic of the charitable community cookbooks that spread after the Civil War, and the attribution to Mrs. E. S. Miller is the whole authority the recipe claims.