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Delicious Cream
One pint cream, one-half package Cox's gelatine, two wine glasses of white wine, juice of two lemons, one cup powdered sugar, bitter almonds for flavoring; soak the gelatine in a cup of cold water, after it is dissolved put sugar, lemons, wine and soaked gelatine into a farina kettle, have the water boiling and let it remain for fifteen minutes, or until the gelatine is dissolved; strain and let it cool before flavoring; whip the cream stiff and beat it gradually into the other ingredients; wet a mould, fill, and set it directly upon the ice until needed.
This is a whipped-cream and wine gelatine mould of a type common on late-Victorian supper tables, but its flavouring is the problem: bitter almonds are not a culinary ingredient in the modern sense, and the recipe cannot be followed as printed. The notes below explain the hazard and decode the period vocabulary so the page can be read on its own terms.
- Bitter almonds are the reason to stopBitter almonds (the kernels of Prunus dulcis var. amara) contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed or chewed and moistened. Nothing in this recipe involves heat after flavouring, so the almonds are added raw to a cold cream that is then chilled and served, and no step reduces the glycoside.
- The quantity is unmeasured"Bitter almonds for flavoring" gives no number, and reported toxic doses for a child are low enough that the difference between a trace and a hazard may come down to a few kernels. There is no way to reconstruct a safe amount from this text, and raw bitter almond kernels are in any case not legally sold for food in the United States.
- If you want this dish, use a current recipeModern wine creams and lemon gelatine moulds exist in reliable published form, with measured gelatine and a flavouring that is not a cyanogenic seed. Use one of those rather than adapting this.
- Cox's gelatineA Scottish brand of gelatine widely sold in British and American kitchens in this period. A package is usually reckoned at about an ounce, so half a package would be roughly half an ounce, or about two modern envelopes of granulated gelatine -- a firm set for a mixture of this size.
- Farina kettleThe nineteenth-century name for a double boiler, sold for cooking farina and other cereals. "Have the water boiling" refers to the outer pan; the gelatine mixture itself is never meant to boil.
- Two wine glassesA Victorian wine glass as a measure is about two fluid ounces, so this is roughly half a cup of white wine. It is not the modern restaurant pour.
- "Set it directly upon the ice"The mould went into the icebox, standing on the block itself for the coldest contact available. A refrigerator at 40F does the same work, and the cream would need several hours to set through.
Wine creams set with gelatine belong to a long line of English and American "jellies" and "creams" that ran from the elaborate flummeries and blancmanges of the eighteenth century down to the packet-gelatine desserts of the twentieth. What put them on ordinary supper tables was industrial gelatine: Cox's in Britain, whose gelatine trade is usually placed loosely around the middle of the nineteenth century, and Knox in America from the 1890s meant a cook no longer had to boil calves' feet for a day to get a set, and moulded creams moved from the confectioner's shop to the household manual. Bitter almond was one of the standard flavourings of that era, valued for the intense marzipan note that we now get from benzaldehyde-based almond extract, and it appears constantly in period recipes for creams, custards and macaroons "" usually, as here, with no measurement at all, which tells you how much such books assumed of the cook and how little they assumed about the reader's safety.}