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I think this will be rather plain but acceptable.

1 qt. Cream, the yolk of 1 egg and the whites of 3, well beaten, sweeten and flavor to taste, dissolve 1 oz gelatine in 1 cup warm milk; stir all together, pour into a mould, and when it congeals it is ready for use. This is nice eaten with cream.

(You can find the original recipe in the facsimile copy reproduced in Tom Kelchner’s new book The Story of the 1881 Cumberland Valley Cook and General Recipe Book)

Congeals is just an underused word for cooking. This is just going to taste like jell-o milk without some sort of flavoring…vanilla seems appropriate. Also an entire quart of cream? I guess cooking is different when you have your own cow. I’m not on a very good roll here, so we are not using a full quart of cream. We have 32 ounces in a quart, but our division is made harder by the eggs. Dividing by 1/3 recipe gives me:

10.5 oz cream

1/3 egg yolk

1 egg white

1/3 oz gelatine

1/3 cup warm milk

I guess this technically has raw egg in it, but I’m not too worried about that. I’m going to assume that we beat the egg whites separately to get this dessert to fluff up a bit.  I am going to let the gelatin soften first in the milk.

Sweeten and flavor to taste sounds like a challenge. I ended up with 3 tablespoons of powdered sugar and 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla. I guess you could do this in one big mold, but I’m going to do little individuals.

I poured out half of it as vanilla, then added 1 tablespoon of cocoa powder to make chocolate. I left this in the fridge overnight.  Added a little mint spring or chocolate sauce for garnish because we’re fancy today.

Reviews “Good” “Tastes like melted ice cream”

My rating? 1/5. These did not set up at all and were a soupy mess. The flavor was fine. Perhaps I don’t know how to use the gelatin correctly or my reducing the recipe threw this one off. I will write this one off as a good idea/ poor execution.

– Rachael Zuch of Zuch Design