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Italian Cream
Pour a gill of cold water over three quarters of an ounce of isinglass and let it stand half an hour. Then turn it into half a pint of boiling hot milk, and add a small stick of cinnamon and bits of lemon peel, and boil it ten minutes, or till the isinglass is all dissolved. Take one pint sweet cream, add one teacupful of fine sugar to it, and beat it well. Squeeze the juice from three oranges add to it a glass of white wine, stir into the cream and sugar and beat rapidly together. Strain the isinglass and milk into it, set the bowl on some pounded ice, and beat up the contents with one egg beaten. When it grows thick put into a mould and place on ice. Serve for desert or a supper dish.
A molded gelatin cream of the sort that filled the dessert chapter of every late nineteenth-century household book. The difficulty is at the very end: a raw egg is beaten into a mixture that has already been chilled on ice and is never heated again.
- The raw egg is the problemThe isinglass and milk are boiled, but by the time the egg goes in the bowl is sitting on pounded ice and the cream is thickening toward setting. The egg is never brought anywhere near 160F, and nothing in the recipe — not the sugar, not the orange juice, not the single glass of wine diluted through a quart-plus of mixture — is acidic or alcoholic enough to make it safe. Holding the finished cream cold does nothing to kill Salmonella; it simply keeps whatever is there alive.
- Why the ice makes it worseWhy the ice matters -- An old-fashioned ice bath around a bowl is not a refrigerator, and the mixture may sit well above refrigeration temperature while it sets and while it is served. Use a current recipe for a molded cream if you want to make one.
- IsinglassNot a synonym for gelatin, though it does the same job. Isinglass is collagen from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish, sold in sheets or shreds and also used to fine wine and beer. It is still available to brewers but is not a kitchen ingredient now, and three quarters of an ounce of it does not convert cleanly to a weight of modern powdered gelatin.
- The units, for reading purposesA gill is half a cup, four fluid ounces. A teacupful of sugar is roughly three quarters of a cup, smaller than a modern measuring cup. A "glass" of wine in period tables is usually reckoned at about two fluid ounces, a quarter cup, though the books are not consistent.
- Sweet creamMeans fresh, unsoured cream, as distinct from cream that had been allowed to sour. It is not sweetened; the sugar is added separately.
- YieldSomewhat over a quart of set cream, enough for six to eight at a dessert or supper table.
Molded creams stiffened with isinglass run through American and British cookbooks from the eighteenth century onward, and "Italian cream" is one of the standard names in that family, alongside Spanish cream, Bavarian cream and Dutch flummery — labels that generally signal a continental style of dish rather than any documented origin abroad. What distinguishes this version is the citrus and wine: a dessert that announced three oranges, plus white wine and a stick of cinnamon, was arguably meant to be seen on a table. Isinglass was the setting agent of choice before commercial powdered gelatin became cheap and reliable in the later nineteenth century, and cooks judged it by eye, boiling until the shreds vanished. The instruction to set the bowl on pounded ice is itself a period marker: it belongs to the decades when ice was delivered to the door and a household could count on having a block to chip at.