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Hazelnut Cream
Put a pint of hazelnut kernels into a warm oven to dry; when dry (while warm) rub them between two coarse towels, to get rid of as much as possible the skins from the nuts. Pound the nuts to a paste, with a little white of egg. Make a custard of the yolks of three eggs and half a pint of milk. Dissolve half an ounce of gelatine in a gill of water; mix it with six ounces of powdered sugar and add to the custard when nearly cold. Stir in the nut paste, taking care that it is well mixed with the custard. Then add half a pint of cream whipped solid. Flavor with vanilla. Mould and set on the ice.
A gelatine-set nut cream, essentially a hazelnut bavarian. The work is all in the nut paste, and the one thing that will sink the dish is a custard that curdles or a gelatine that seizes before it is combined.
- Nut quantityA pint of shelled hazelnut kernels is roughly 10 oz / 280 g by weight. Buy them raw with skins on if you can; blanched, pre-skinned nuts are duller in flavour.
- "A warm oven to dry"The recipe gives no temperature, and a low oven is what is meant. Ten to fifteen minutes is enough to loosen the skins and bring out the oil; the recipe directs you to rub the nuts while they are still warm, so do it in batches.
- Pounding the pasteA food processor does in two minutes what a mortar does in twenty. Pulse rather than run it continuously, or the nuts pass paste and become butter, which will streak the finished cream with oil.
- The raw egg whiteThe white is only a binder to keep the paste from oiling, and it is never heated in this recipe. Use a pasteurised white, or leave it out and bind the paste with a spoonful of the cooled custard instead.
- Gill and gelatineA gill is half a cup. Half an ounce of gelatine is about two modern envelopes (each 1/4 oz); soften it in the cold water first, then warm it gently to dissolve. Period gelatines may not have set as firmly as today's, so err toward the lower end if you want a spoonable cream rather than a sliceable one.
- Timing the combinationCook the custard to 170-180F, until it coats a spoon, and no further. Add the sugared gelatine when the custard is barely warm, and fold in the whipped cream only when the mixture is cool and just beginning to thicken. Too hot and the cream deflates; too cold and the gelatine sets in ropes.
- "Set on the ice"The Victorian equivalent of the refrigerator. Chill the mould at least four hours, preferably overnight. Dip briefly in warm water to turn out.
- YieldSomething over a quart of mixture, serving six to eight. Good with a plain berry sauce, which cuts the richness the nuts and cream build up.
Hazelnut cream belongs to the family of moulded gelatine creams that filled the "fancy dishes" pages of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century cookbooks: a cooked custard, a nut or fruit flavouring, powdered gelatine, and whipped cream, turned out of a decorative mould at the end of dinner. Their popularity is often linked to the spread of cheap packaged gelatine, which replaced the laborious business of boiling calves' feet and isinglass and put an elaborate-looking cold sweet within reach of a household with one cook. The pounded-nut paste is older still, a direct descendant of the almond pastes and nut milks of European confectionery; hazelnuts were called filberts in most American books of the period. The instruction to "set on the ice" is a reminder that this was a dish for a house with an icebox and a standing ice delivery.