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Walnut Cream
Pound one pint of these nuts, after rubbing them well in a cloth. Make the same custard as for hazelnut cream. Stir in the walnut paste until smooth; add whipped cream; color a pale pink with cochineal, and flavor with vanilla. Mould and set on ice. Serve with whipped cream, flavored with wine.
A moulded nut cream of the bavarois type, written for a cook who had already read the hazelnut cream on the preceding page. Two things are left unsaid — the custard formula and the setting agent — and both need supplying before you start.
- The missing custardThe book expects you to turn back to hazelnut cream. A workable base of the kind used at the time would be 1 pint (2 cups) milk or single cream, 5 egg yolks and 4 oz sugar, stirred over low heat to 175–180F until it coats a spoon, then strained and cooled.
- The missing gelatine"Mould and set on ice" only works if something is setting it. Creams of this era were stiffened with isinglass or sheet gelatine, and the quantity was presumably given in the hazelnut recipe. Reckon on about 2 teaspoons of powdered gelatine per pint of custard; anything less and it will slump when turned out.
- A pint of walnutsMeasured by volume in the shelled state, which is roughly 6–7 oz / 180–200 g of halves. Rubbing them in a cloth is to shed the papery skin, which carries most of the bitterness — worth doing properly.
- Pounding without making nut butterA mortar gives a dry paste; a food processor will run straight past that into oily walnut butter. Pulse the nuts with a spoonful of the sugar from the custard, and stop while the texture is still sandy.
- CochinealStill sold as carmine or natural red 4. It is made from insects, so it is neither vegetarian nor suitable for everyone; a few drops give the intended pale pink. Any red food colour will do the same job.
- "Set on ice"The nineteenth-century ice cave, not the freezer. Chill the filled mould in the refrigerator for at least four hours, or overnight. To unmould, dip briefly in warm water and invert onto a cold plate.
- Wine in the creamSherry, Madeira or a sweet white are all in keeping. About a tablespoon per cup of cream, added with a little sugar once the cream is at soft peaks — more and it will refuse to whip.
- YieldA pint of custard plus the walnut paste and whipped cream will need a mould of at least 2 pints, and serves about six.
"Creams" occupy a whole class of their own in Victorian and Edwardian dessert cookery: a flavoured custard, lightened with whipped cream, set with isinglass or gelatine and turned out of a decorative mould. They were the domestic descendant of the French bavarois, and cookbooks of this period print them in long runs — coffee cream, chocolate cream, hazelnut cream, walnut cream — each one a variation on a single base recipe, which is why this entry can begin halfway through. The pale pink from cochineal is pure period taste: the natural colour of a walnut custard is a muddy grey-brown, and a moulded dish was expected to look ornamental on the table. Cochineal, imported from Mexico and the Canaries, was the standard red of the Victorian kitchen and store cupboard before coal-tar dyes displaced it.