Weekend Cooking: Floating island dessert recipe

Recipe from 1840:

Take a quart of rich cream, and divide it in half.

Sweeten one pint of it with loaf-sugar, and stir into it sufficient currant jelly to colour it of a fine pink.

Put it into a glass bowl, and place in the centre a pile of sliced almond-sponge cake, or of lady cake; every slice spread thickly with raspberry jam or marmalade, and laid evenly one on another.

Have ready the other pint of cream, flavoured with a few drops of oil of lemon, and beaten with rods to a stiff froth. Heap it all over the pile of cake, so as entirely to cover it.

Source: Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches by Eliza Leslie

Modern recipe:

Floating islands on BBC Good Foods
Julia Child’s Floating Islands Recipe

It's interesting how it evolves from a cake with jelly and jam to a light dessert consisting of meringue floating on crème anglaise