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Cream, Burnt
Boil a pint of milk in a saucepan, with a stick of cinnamon, and a little candied lemon-peel cut into small pieces. Let it remain by the side of the fire to draw out the flavour, then strain it, and pour it over the yolks of three or four eggs well beaten. Put the mixture on the fire, and simmer the custard gently until it thickens. Pour it into a dish; when cold, cover the surface with powdered loaf sugar, and brown with a salamander. Time, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for a pint and a half of cream.
A stirred custard finished with a caramelised sugar crust — crème brûlée before the name was standard in English cookbooks. The whole dish turns on how gently the custard is cooked.
- Imperial pintCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so use 2½ US cups of milk. The closing line, "sufficient for a pint and a half," appears to be a quantity note rather than an ingredient, though the book does not say what it counts as a serving.
- Don't let it boilThe hinge of the recipe. "Simmer the custard gently" is period shorthand for cooking it below a simmer — pull it at 175-180F, when it coats the back of a spoon. Actual simmering scrambles the yolks, and no amount of stirring brings them back.
- Infusion time"Let it remain by the side of the fire" means holding the milk hot but not boiling on the cool edge of the range. Off the heat, covered, for 20-30 minutes does the same work; longer gives a stronger cinnamon note.
- Candied lemon-peelThe sugared peel sold for cakes, not fresh zest. It is sweeter and less sharp; if you substitute the pared zest of one lemon, expect a brighter, more acidic flavour and add a spoonful of sugar to the milk.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold in hard cones and broken up as needed; "powdered loaf sugar" is sugar crushed fine, roughly today's caster or superfine sugar. Granulated works but caramelises less evenly. Spread it in a thin, complete layer — thick sugar melts to syrup before it colours.
- SalamanderA heavy iron disc on a handle, heated red in the fire and held just above the sugar. A propane torch is the direct descendant; a broiler set high with the dish close to the element also works, but chill the custard hard first so the heat only reaches the top.
- Custards are still softThis is a stovetop custard, not a baked one, so it sets softer than a modern baked brûlée. Chill at least three hours before sugaring; the surface needs to be cold and firm to take a crust.
- Cost8d — eightpence — is the Victorian price note Cassell's attaches to most entries, useful chiefly as a marker of how cheap an egg-and-milk pudding was against a meat course.
Burnt cream appears in English cookery books well before it settled into the French name by which the dish is now widely known; a version called "burnt cream" is recorded in eighteenth-century English manuscript and printed collections, and the dish is also claimed by Trinity College, Cambridge, where the crest is said, by college tradition, to have been branded into the sugar with a hot iron. The claim that any one kitchen invented it is not documented \,, and scorching sugar with a salamander was simply what you did with a hot iron and a flat surface. The flavouring here is cinnamon stick and candied lemon-peel, a pairing often met with in Victorian milk puddings, rather than the vanilla more familiar today. The salamander itself was ordinary equipment in a nineteenth-century kitchen, kept in the fire for glazing and browning long before anyone owned a grill.