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Snow Pudding (II)
Mrs. D.
One-half package Coxe's gelatine; pour over it a cup of cold water and add one and one-half cups of sugar; when soft, add one cup boiling water, juice of one lemon and the whites of four well beaten eggs; beat all together until very light; put in glass dish and pour over it custard made as follows : One pint milk, yolks of four eggs and grated rind of one lemon; boil. Splendid.
This is the standard American snow pudding: lemon gelatine whipped stiff with raw egg white, floated over a soft custard. The custard is cooked, but the whites in the snow are not, and nothing in the method brings them near a safe temperature.
- The raw whites are the problemFour egg whites are beaten cold into a gelatine base that has already been slackened with a cup of cold water before the boiling water goes in. The mixture is warm at best, and it is then chilled and served. Whites can carry Salmonella as well as yolks, and a warm gelatine sponge held for hours is a hospitable place for anything present. Use a current recipe if you want snow pudding.
- Nor does the custard fix itThe soft custard is poured over the snow, not cooked with it. A pint of custard spread over a bulky gelatine foam loses its heat quickly and cannot be relied on to pasteurise the whites underneath.
- Coxe's gelatineCoxe's was one of the packaged gelatines sold to American households in this period. Package sizes were not standardised, so "half a package" cannot be converted to modern envelopes with any confidence.
- "Boil" the custard is wrongA pint of milk with four yolks boiled will curdle. In period books "boil" is often used loosely for cooking a custard until it coats the spoon, but taken literally the instruction ruins it.
- YieldHalf a package of gelatine with a pint of custard makes a dessert for several people. The recipe calls for a glass dish, so the white-over-yellow layering was meant to be seen.
Snow pudding, sometimes called lemon sponge or snow jelly, was one of the great democratic desserts of the late nineteenth century, made possible by cheap packaged gelatine. Before Peter Cooper's patent and the packaged brands that followed, a jelly meant hours of boiling calves' feet and clearing the stock with egg shell; a paper packet reduced that to a cup of cold water. The Home Cook Book, compiled from contributions by named local women -- here "Mrs. D." -- is a fundraising community cookbook of exactly the kind that spread such recipes, and the verdict "Splendid" at the end may well be the contributor's own endorsement rather than an editor's. The pairing of a whipped white jelly with a thin boiled custard, or creme anglaise, is often traced to English floating island and its French cousin oeufs a la neige, and it had the practical virtue of using the whites and the yolks of the same four eggs in a single dish.