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CURRANT CREAM, RED (another way)
Put a small jar of red currant-jelly, the juice of a lemon, half a cupful of water, and two table-spoonfuls of sugar into a saucepan. When the jelly is dissolved, let the mixture cool a little, then add more sugar if necessary. Then proceed as directed in the previous recipe. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for one quart.
A dictionary entry rather than a standalone recipe: it gives you a sweetened red currant base and then hands you off to the preceding entry for the setting and moulding. Read both before starting, and treat the quantities below as the missing conversions.
- The cross-reference is the whole method"Proceed as directed in the previous recipe" is where the cream actually becomes a cream. The preceding entry is not reproduced here, but a Cassell's "cream" of this class generally involves dissolving a setting agent (isinglass or gelatine) in the fruit base, cooling it until it begins to thicken, combining it with cream, and moulding it. Read the parent entry first: without that step you have flavoured syrup.
- A small jar of jellyThe book does not define the size; taking it as something in the region of 225-250 g (about ¾ cup) of red currant jelly gives a workable intensity for a quart of finished cream.
- Half a cupful of waterTake this as 4 fl oz / 120 ml. Cassell's cup is not a standardised measure, but the ratio matters more than the absolute: just enough liquid to melt the jelly without thinning the flavour.
- Add sugar with careTwo tablespoons is a starting point only, and the instruction to let the mixture cool and then add more sugar "if necessary" invites you to taste and correct. With a sweet modern jelly you may need little or none.
- Dissolve, do not boilWarm the jelly only until it is liquid and clear, as the recipe directs; there is nothing to be gained by boiling it, and if a setting agent has already gone in, hard boiling will weaken it.
- Setting agentIf the parent recipe calls for isinglass, powdered or leaf gelatine can stand in: in the region of 15 g (about 2 sachets) per quart of finished mixture for a cream firm enough to unmould, less if you intend to serve it in glasses.
- Time and yieldThe stated half an hour is preparation only. Allow four hours' chilling, or overnight, before turning out. One quart serves six to eight as a moulded cream.
- That price2s. 6d. for a quart was not a cheap pudding — a reminder that the cost lies in the cream and the preserve, not the technique.
Cassell's arranges its material alphabetically like an encyclopaedia, which is why this entry reads as a variation slotted in beside its parent recipe rather than as a self-contained set of instructions. A "cream" in this sense is not the dairy product but a class of moulded cold sweet — fruit or flavouring, a setting agent, and whipped cream, turned out of a shaped tin — of a kind often said to have been a fixture of English dessert courses from the mid nineteenth century until domestic refrigeration and changing fashion pushed them aside. Using red currant jelly rather than fresh fruit was the practical choice: currants have a very short summer season, and boiling the glut into jelly meant the flavour could be drawn on in January. The lemon juice restores the bite that boiling and sugaring take out of the fruit.