'Tis the Season for Southern Cookin': Snow Cake and Snow Custard

Today ushers in the very merry month of December and the official start of the Christmas season here at the blog! To celebrate this festive time of year, we'll be bringing you plenty of holiday blog posts all month long, including several special editions of Southern Cookin'.  Each week leading up to Christmas, we'll feature seasonal Southern recipes from the Gone with the Wind era to get you in the holiday spirit. 
  

And today we are pleased to not only inaugurate this holiday series, but to also introduce a new cookbook to our collection. Our recipes, selected for their wintry feel, come courtesy of The Dixie cook-book, published in 1883 in Scarlett's home base of Atlanta, Georgia. We hope you enjoy them, and be sure to stay tuned for more goodies next week!

Favorite Snow-Cake

Beat one cup butter to a cream, add one and a half cups flour and stir very thoroughly together; then add one cup corn starch, and one cup sweet milk in which three tea-spoons baking-powder have been dissolved; last, add whites of eight eggs and two cups sugar well beaten together; flavor to taste, bake in sheets, and put together with icing.

Snow Custard

Half a package of Coxe's gelatine, three eggs, two cups of sugar, juice of one lemon; soak the gelatine one hour in a tea-cup of cold water, add one pint boiling water, stir until thoroughly dissolved. Add two-thirds of the sugar and the lemon juice; beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and when the gelatine is quite cold, whip it into the whites, a spoonful at a time, from half an hour to an hour.

Whip steadily and evenly, and when all is stiff, pour in a mold, or in a dozen egg-glasses previously wet with cold water, and set in a cold place. In four or five hours turn into a glass dish. Make a custard of one and one-half pints milk, yolks of eggs, and remainder of the sugar, flavor with vanilla, and when the meringue or snow-balls are turned out of the mold, pour this around the base.