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Spanish Cream
One box Coxe's gelatine dissolved in a pint of cold milk; into two quarts boiling milk stir one and a half cups sugar and the yolks of eight eggs; pour all upon the dissolved gelatine, stirring well. When cool add half a pint wine, or flavor with lemon or vanilla, place in dishes and cover with a meringue made of the beaten whites, the juice of one lemon, and one cup sugar; brown in oven two minutes and eat ice-cold.-Susan R. Howard, Brooklyn, New York.
A jellied custard scaled for a Victorian table — nearly three quarts of liquid before the wine goes in. Most of the work of modernising is arithmetic, temperature control, and deciding what to do about the meringue.
- The hinge: temper the yolksAs written the eight yolks go straight into two quarts of boiling milk, which will scramble them unless the milk is off the boil and you are whisking hard. Whisk a ladleful of hot milk into the yolks first, return the mixture to the pan, and hold it at 170-175F until it coats a spoon.
- "One box Coxe's gelatine"A box of the old sparkling gelatine is usually reckoned at roughly an ounce, i.e. about 4 envelopes or 2 level tablespoons of modern powdered gelatine (about 28 g), though box sizes varied and the equivalence is an estimate. Against 2.5 quarts of milk plus a cup of wine that gives a soft, spoonable set rather than a firm mould.
- Bloom, don't just stirSprinkle the gelatine over the pint of cold milk and leave it 5-10 minutes to swell before the hot custard goes in. Dumping dry granules into cold liquid and stirring gives you lumps that never fully dissolve.
- Half a pint of wineThat is one cup. The recipe says only "wine"; a fortified wine such as sherry, Madeira or Marsala suits the sugar level, while a cup of dry table wine will read as sour. If you use the lemon or vanilla option instead, add the flavouring after the custard has cooled.
- The meringue is essentially rawTwo minutes of browning colours the surface and does nothing to the interior of the whites, and here it sits on a cold dessert that will never be heated again. Use pasteurised whites, or make a cooked meringue (Italian or Swiss), if anyone at the table is elderly, pregnant, very young or immunocompromised.
- "Brown in oven two minutes"The book gives no temperature; two minutes implies the top of a very hot oven, or a broiler, with the dish watched constantly. Meringue on a chilled gelatine cream also tends to weep within a few hours, so brown it shortly before serving.
- Chilling"Eat ice-cold" is not decoration — the set depends on it. Give the filled dishes at least 4 hours in the refrigerator, and note that gelatine at this ratio will slacken again if the desserts sit out at room temperature.
- YieldThe full recipe fills something like 16-20 individual dishes. Halving or quartering it is reasonable for a modern household; the proportions scale cleanly.
Spanish cream was one of the standard names for a boiled custard set with gelatine and served cold -- a dish whose connection to Spain is traditional rather than documented. The brand named here, Cox's sparkling gelatine, made by J. & G. Cox of Edinburgh, was sold in boxes and was one of the packaged gelatines that turned the ingredient into a pantry staple rather than something extracted from calves' feet over a long day at the stove; because it was on sale over many decades, the brand name does not date the recipe closely. Buckeye Cookery gives creams and custards a whole section, and a home cook in Brooklyn could send an eight-yolk, two-quart recipe to an Ohio compilation. The named contributor is characteristic of the book, which was assembled from the receipts of real households and printed their names beside them.