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Russian Cream
To six pints of fresh milk add one full cup of sugar, half box of gelatine, four eggs well beaten, vanilla to taste. Dissolve the gelatine in part of the
A gelatine-set custard of the kind that filled the "fancy dishes" chapter of turn-of-the-century American books. The proportions here need a careful eye before you commit six pints of milk to a mould.
- Half a box of gelatineHousehold gelatine of the period was commonly sold in boxes of about one ounce, though sizes varied, so half a box is roughly half an ounce: about two of today's quarter-ounce envelopes, or a scant tablespoon and a half of powder. Granulated gelatine must be softened in cold liquid for five to ten minutes before it meets anything warm.
- The set will be very softAbout half an ounce of gelatine (two envelopes) to six pints of milk is roughly a third of the usual ratio of one envelope per two cups of liquid, even allowing for the setting power of the eggs. As written it will barely hold a shape; either the milk quantity or the gelatine quantity looks out of proportion, and the sugar and egg count suit a much smaller batch.
- Six pints is a party quantityTwelve cups of milk plus eggs and sugar comes to something over three quarts, nearly twice a two-quart mould, and serves twenty or more. Scaling to a quart of milk, one egg, a quarter cup of sugar and one envelope of gelatine gives six to eight portions, though that is still a soft set by modern ratios.
- Eggs mean a stirred custardBeaten eggs in a milk-and-gelatine cream are meant to be cooked into a custard base, stirred over gentle heat until it coats a spoon at about 170-175F, never boiled or it curdles. The instruction line has not survived in full, so treat it as a boiled-custard method rather than folding raw egg into warm milk.
- Vanilla to tasteExtract goes in off the heat, after the custard has cooled a little, or the flavour bakes off. About two teaspoons for a full quart of milk.
- Moulding and chillingStrain the finished cream, pour into a rinsed mould, and give it at least four hours in the refrigerator, preferably overnight. Dip the mould briefly in warm water to turn it out.
"Russian cream" was a standing name in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and British cookery for a moulded custard set with gelatine or isinglass, usually flavoured with vanilla, wine or lemon, and often served with preserved fruit. The Russian attribution is largely decorative: cooks of the period attached national names to moulded creams and jellies much as they did to soups, and the family includes Bavarian cream, Spanish cream and Italian cream, none of which reliably originate where the label says. What made such dishes possible in an ordinary household was the arrival of packaged gelatine, sold under brand names from the mid-nineteenth century and increasingly available in granulated form towards its end, which replaced the long labour of boiling calves' feet or clarifying isinglass and put moulded desserts squarely in the "fancy dishes" chapter of general-purpose cookbooks like this one.