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Lemon Sponge
Mrs. Lambkin.
Two ounces of gelatine; pour over one pint of cold water; let it stand fifteen minutes; add half a pint of boiling water, three-quarters of a pound of white sugar, and the juice of four lemons. When the gelatine is cold, before it begins to get firm, add the well-beaten whites of three eggs; beat the whole fifteen minutes, until the mixture is quite white, and begin to thicken; then put in a mould first wet in cold water.
A cold gelatine whip of the sort that filled Victorian moulds, but the three egg whites are folded into liquid that has already cooled and are never cooked at any point.
- Why this one failsThe whites go in once the gelatine is cold and the whole thing sets in a mould in the cold. Nothing in the method ever brings the egg above room temperature, so any Salmonella present in the shell eggs survives into the finished dessert. This is not a batter that will later be baked; it is served as it stands.
- Who is most at riskUncooked-egg desserts are specifically the category that public health guidance singles out for pregnant people, young children, the elderly and anyone immunocompromised — exactly the household audience a moulded party sweet was made for. Use a current recipe for lemon sponge or snow pudding instead.
- The gelatine is not comparable to yoursTwo ounces of 1870s sheet or shred gelatine set the pint and a half of liquid called for here. Modern powdered gelatine is generally stronger and more consistent — a quarter-ounce envelope is sold as setting two cups — so the quantity here is not a conversion you can carry across.
- UnitsA pint here may be the American 16 fl oz or the imperial 20 fl oz; a Toronto book of 1877 could use either and the recipe does not say which. Three-quarters of a pound of sugar is about 1 2/3 cups.
- "Let it stand fifteen minutes"This is the bloom, and the old shred gelatines genuinely needed it in cold water before hot water would dissolve them cleanly. The second fifteen minutes, the beating, is what turns the clear jelly opaque and increases its bulk — it is a meringue-and-jelly foam, not a jelly.
- YieldThe unwhipped mixture is roughly a quart; beaten with the whites it swells well beyond that, so judge the mould size by eye rather than to a stated capacity.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, making it one of the earliest Canadian community cookbooks; it carries credit lines such as "Mrs. Lambkin," though the book drew substantially on earlier American compilations, so a credit line is not in itself evidence of local authorship. Lemon sponge belongs to a large family of nineteenth-century whipped gelatine sweets — snow pudding, lemon jelly, Spanish cream — that became household cooking only once commercially prepared gelatine in sheets and shreds replaced the day-long labour of boiling down calves' feet. Whipping the setting jelly with beaten whites was the trick that made a cheap, mostly-water dessert look like something: the foam turns it white, swells the apparent quantity, and holds the shape of an ornamental mould. Granulated gelatine sold in pre-measured envelopes came later, which is why quantities in books of this period rarely translate directly.