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Snow Pudding
Mrs. Frisbie.
One-third of a box of gelatine, (the best you can find); soak ten minutes in cold water; put on the stove and stir until it is dissolved; let it cool then beat to a froth; take the whites of two eggs beaten to a froth, one cup of sugar, flavour with lemon ; mix all together and put in small cups first wet in water, and set away to cool and harden, Make a soft custard of the yolks, turn over the pudding when cold, and it is ready for the table.
A classic nineteenth-century snow pudding: gelatine whipped to a foam with raw egg whites, unmoulded, and flooded with a soft custard made from the leftover yolks. The mechanics are sound, but the whites in the pudding itself are never cooked, and the recipe as printed leaves out the liquid measurement entirely.
- Why not as writtenThe beaten whites are folded into cooled gelatine and set in cups without ever reaching a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Unlike a meringue or a baked pudding, nothing in this component is cooked at any stage. Use a current recipe if you want a snow pudding.
- The custard is the safer halfThe recipe says only to make a soft custard of the yolks; in period usage that means a stirred yolk-and-milk custard, thickened over gentle heat to the coating stage rather than boiled. No quantities or temperature are given. It is the uncooked foam beneath the sauce, not the sauce, that is the problem.
- A box of gelatineBox sizes were not standardised in this period, but a box on the order of an ounce is the usual working assumption, which would make one-third of a box somewhere in the region of 8-10 g, roughly comparable to a modern envelope. Gelatine of the period was commonly sold in sheets or shreds, which take a longer soak than modern granulated gelatine.
- The missing liquidThe recipe says to soak the gelatine in cold water and dissolve it, but never says how much. A pint of total liquid, part of it lemon juice, is a common figure in comparable recipes, but as printed here the proportion is unrecoverable.
- "Beat to a froth" twiceThe instruction applies both to the cooling gelatine and to the whites. The gelatine must be cooled to the point of thickening but not set before whipping, which is the hinge of the whole dish and the reason it is so often described as tricky.
- "Flavour with lemon"This could mean juice, grated rind, or the lemon extract then on sale; the recipe does not say which. Some acidity matters here, since a cup of sugar in a plain gelatine foam is otherwise cloying.
- Small cups first wet in waterWetting the moulds is the standard trick for turning out gelatine cleanly. It is still the right approach with any unlined mould.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold to benefit the Hospital for Sick Children, making it one of the earliest and most successful Canadian community fundraising cookbooks; its contents were drawn heavily from an American compilation of the same name, which is why the recipes read as broadly North American rather than distinctly Canadian. Snow pudding, also called lemon sponge, belongs to the wave of gelatine desserts that spread through middle-class kitchens once packaged gelatine replaced the day-long labour of boiling calves' feet for stock. Whipping gelatine to a foam was a way of turning a small, expensive quantity into a large, impressive dish, and the leftover yolks going straight into a soft custard sauce is exactly the sort of thrift these subscription books were built on. The attribution to Mrs. Frisbie is typical of the form: contributors' names sit alongside the recipes, and the book served its subscribing households as well as its cooks.