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Hamburg Cream
Stir together the rind and juice of two large lemons, and one cup sugar, add the well-beaten yolks of eight eggs; put all in a tin pail, set in a pot of boiling water, stir for three minutes, take from the fire, add the well-beaten whites of the eggs, and serve, when cold, in custard-glasses. - Mrs. C. Fullington.
This is a raw-egg dessert in all but name, and that is the fact that governs everything else about it. The notes below explain the hazard and the period vocabulary, not how to reproduce the dish.
- The whites are never cooked at allEight beaten whites are folded in after the pail comes off the heat, and the cream is then chilled and served. Nothing in the procedure brings them anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella is reliably destroyed.
- Three minutes over water will not pasteurise the yolks eitherThree minutes over water will not reliably pasteurise the yolks either -- a tin pail set in boiling water gives no temperature control, and three minutes of stirring is aimed at thickening, not at holding a temperature long enough for pasteurisation. Whether the yolks ever reach a safe temperature, and for how long, is simply unknown.
- Acid is not a safeguardThe juice of two lemons flavours the cream, but citric acid at this dilution does not sanitise eggs.
- Volume and holding time make it worseEight eggs' worth of foam, served cold in glasses, means a large batch sitting at room temperature while it is portioned and while it waits to be eaten. If a bad egg is in the bowl, the whole batch carries it. Use a current recipe if you want a lemon cream.
- "Tin pail set in a pot of boiling water"This is simply a double boiler, improvised from the lightest vessel in the kitchen. Thin tinned ware heats quickly.
- Rind means zestNineteenth-century recipes say rind where we say zest. Here it is simply stirred together with the juice and sugar.
- Custard-glassesSmall stemmed or handled glasses, on the order of two to three ounces. The recipe gives no yield, but eight eggs and a cup of sugar would have filled a good many of them: a dessert for a table rather than for four.
Hamburg cream belongs to a family of whipped lemon-and-egg desserts that circulated through nineteenth-century American and British household books under a scatter of German-sounding names, the geography usually gesturing at fashion rather than provenance. What distinguishes it from a proper boiled custard is the absence of milk: the body comes entirely from egg and the aeration from separately beaten whites, which makes it cheap in dairy and lavish in eggs, a sensible trade on a farm with hens. Buckeye Cookery (1877, compiled from the contributions of Ohio housewives and printed with the contributor's name attached, as here with Mrs. C. Fullington) is full of such attributions, and they are the book's real interest, a record of what individual women in the Midwest actually put on their tables. The recipe also shows how differently the period read the danger of eggs, which were considered wholesome and strengthening in near-raw form and were fed that way to invalids well into the twentieth century.