My Great Great Grandpa's Cookbook: Oeufs à la Neige
Each month I am cooking a recipe from my Great Great Grandpa's cookbook.
Served during October, Victor suggests, after a meal of Brill cooked in Madeira, lamb chops and a Russian salad (there are menus for each week of the year at the back of the book). He describes this pud as a ‘simple, cheap, and yet effective sweet dish’. So, here goes:
"Beat up a quantity of white of egg into a froth with a little sugar. Have some milk, previously sweetened, in a saucepan on the fire, and when it boils throw in your egg froth in separate tablespoonfuls. A few seconds will cook each on one side; then turn it over, and, when cooked on the other side, place it in a glass dish. When all your egg froth is cooked, strain the milk from the bits of eggs that are in it, and make a custard with it and the yolks of the eggs, flavouring it as you like. When cold, pour it into the glass dish, but not over the boiled whites which will float on the top of the custard. Sprinkle a few nonpareil (“hundreds and thousands”) over the white, and serve.”
It was great! A bit strange, cooking egg whites in milk, and I potentially (read certainly) under whisked and over cooked them. But it was excellent. I mean, custard doused in hundreds and thousands - what’s not to like?! Very strange to imagine Victorian gentlemen eating this at a dinner party though… perhaps they did have a sense of humour after all.
