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Flummery
Melt two ounces of gelatine in a pint and a half of water; add a wine-glassful of sherry and half a glass of brandy, with the juice of three lemons, and sugar enough to sweeten. Stir into the liquid when cold a pint of double cream which has been whisked until it began to thicken. If mixed while warm the lemon-juice will curdle it. Moulds should be dipped in water or oiled, and the flummery should be allowed to set a day before turning out. Blanched almonds, slit lengthwise, stuck round the flummery, or preserved cherries, look well. Probable cost, 3s. for this quantity. Sufficient for two moulds.
A late-Victorian set cream, closer to what we would call a lemon syllabub jelly than to the oatmeal flummery of earlier centuries. Nearly everything hinges on temperature.
- The one thing that mattersThe gelatine mixture must be genuinely cold — thickened at the edges but still pourable — before the whipped cream goes in. Warm acidic liquid will curdle the cream, exactly as the original warns, and there is no recovering it.
- Gelatine strengthVictorian gelatine was a more variable and generally weaker product than modern powdered gelatine, so two ounces at this rate is likely to give a rubbery, sliceable block. About 1 oz (four ¼-oz envelopes) to a pint and a half of liquid produces a set that still trembles.
- Melting it"Melt" means soften in a little of the cold water first, then warm gently until clear. Boiling gelatine weakens its setting power.
- A wine-glassfulRoughly 2 fl oz in this period. The "half a glass" of brandy is less certain — a brandy glass and a wine glass were not the same measure — so 1 fl oz is a reasonable reading.
- Double creamBritish double cream runs about 48% fat. US heavy cream (36–40%) works but whips softer; stop while it is barely thickened, as instructed, or the mixture will be too stiff to fold in smoothly.
- Moulds and settingOiling with a flavourless oil is more reliable than wetting. A full day in the refrigerator is not excessive for a mixture this rich; to turn out, dip the mould briefly in hot water and invert onto a wetted plate so the flummery can be slid into position.
- DecorationSplit blanched almonds pressed into the surface after unmoulding will slide on a cold, damp jelly; press them in firmly and return it to the cold for ten minutes.
- YieldTwo moulds. The mixture comes to close to three pints in all, so each mould holds appreciably more than a pint; enough for eight to ten. The "3s." costing is Victorian money.
Flummery began as something quite different: the word comes from the Welsh llymru, a sour jelly made by steeping oatmeal husks in water until they fermented, then boiling the strained liquid until it thickened. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English cookbooks record it in that form, eaten with cream, honey or wine. As isinglass and later commercial gelatine became cheap and reliable, the oatmeal dropped out entirely and the name attached itself to whatever the cream and wine had been poured over — so by the time this book was compiled, flummery meant a moulded cream jelly and sat comfortably beside blancmange and Bavarian cream. The dish's slide from substance into froth is generally credited with giving English the other sense of the word, flummery as empty nonsense.