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Mont Blanc
Mrs. F. B. Orr.
One-third box of gelatine, grated rind of two lemons, two cups of sugar, one pint of boiling water. Before the mixture gets stiff, stir in the whites of five eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Eat with custard, boiled, made with yolks of eggs and one pint of boiling milk. Sweeten to taste, flavour with vanilla. Excellent.
This is a lemon snow pudding under a grander name: a sweetened gelatine jelly lightened with beaten egg whites and served in a pool of boiled custard. The whites, however, are folded in raw and never brought to any cooking temperature, which is where the recipe fails a modern kitchen.
- The raw whites are the problemFive egg whites go into a gelatine mixture that is only warm at best, and the dessert is then chilled and eaten. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would deal with Salmonella in a shell egg, and the mixture is left to cool slowly at room temperature. If you want a lemon snow pudding, use a current recipe built for pasteurised whites or a cooked meringue.
- A box of gelatineBoxes of gelatine in this period were not standardised, and "one-third box" cannot be converted with confidence; a third of a one-ounce box would be roughly a tablespoon of powder, or a little over one modern quarter-ounce envelope. Gelatine of the period, sold in sheets as well as granules, also varied in setting strength, which is one reason old recipes set too soft or too rubbery.
- The missing soakThe recipe lists a pint of boiling water but says nothing about softening the gelatine in cold liquid first, which granulated gelatine needs if it is to dissolve fully rather than clump. The omission suggests these community books assumed the cook already knew the step.
- "Before the mixture gets stiff"This is the timing hinge of the original: the jelly has to be cool enough not to slacken the froth, but still fluid enough to fold.
- The custard is the sound halfThe sauce — yolks, presumably the five left over, with a pint of boiled milk, sweetened and flavoured with vanilla — is a straightforward stirred custard. It is the one part of this page that follows recognisable modern practice, though the recipe gives no guidance on how far to cook it.
- YieldA pint of water with two cups of sugar and five whites makes a bulky, foamy sweet, enough for a large dish; the recipe gives no serving count.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was a compiled charity cookbook, its recipes credited by name to the ladies who sent them in — hence "Mrs. F. B. Orr" and the one-word verdict "Excellent" at the end, which reads like a neighbour's endorsement rather than an editor's. The name Mont Blanc was attached to all sorts of white, peaked, snowy desserts in the later nineteenth century; the chestnut-purée version now standard in French pâtisserie is a different dish entirely, and here the reference is simply to a mound of white froth rising out of pale yellow custard, like a summit above cloud. Cheap commercial gelatine, sold in sheets as well as granulated, is often credited as the enabling ingredient: once it could be bought ready-made instead of boiled down from calves' feet at home, jellied and whipped desserts seem to have passed more easily from the professional kitchen into ordinary household repertoires, and books like this one filled with them.