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Fruit Cream for Tarts
A very nice cream for fruit tarts is made by boiling peach-or bay-leaves (to extract their flavour) in milk. Two or three leaves in a quart of milk will be sufficient. Boil until flavoured; add, when strained and sweetened, four well-whisked eggs; heat it, stirring steadily until thick, but it must not boil. This cream is eaten also with stewed fruit of any kind.
This is a stirred custard flavoured by infusion, and the flavouring is the problem. The technique is ordinary; the leaves are not.
- Peach leaves are cyanogenicPeach leaves, like bitter almond and apricot kernels, contain cyanogenic glycosides (prunasin in the leaf tissue), which release hydrogen cyanide when the leaf is broken and wetted. Steeping them in hot milk is precisely the condition that liberates it, and the dose from an infusion is not measurable in a home kitchen.
- "Bay-leaves" here is ambiguous and possibly worseIn nineteenth-century English confectionery, leaves used for a bitter-almond flavour in creams were sometimes cherry laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) rather than culinary bay (Laurus nobilis). Cherry laurel is strongly cyanogenic and was the subject of recorded poisonings; because the original does not specify which plant is meant, the instruction cannot be followed safely.
- The flavour being soughtThe point of both leaves was a benzaldehyde note — the almond-and-marzipan smell that also signals the presence of the cyanide precursor. The pleasant smell and the hazard come from the same reaction, which is one reason the practice was given up.
- Quantity gives no protection"Two or three leaves in a quart" reads as restrained, but leaf size, age and how much they are bruised all change the yield, and there is no way to test the result. A small margin on an unmeasurable toxin is not a margin.
- If you want this custardThe base itself is a plain crème anglaise: infused milk, four eggs, sweetened, thickened over heat without boiling. Use a current recipe for a stirred custard and a modern flavouring.
Leaf infusions of this kind were common in English and French confectionery from the eighteenth century onward, and cookery writers of the period recommended peach, laurel and nectarine leaves for blancmanges, custards and puddings. Their decline was not simply a matter of taste. Nineteenth-century medical and coronial literature connected laurel-flavoured creams and "laurel water" with prussic-acid poisoning, and by the twentieth century the flavour was more often supplied by almond essence, whose benzaldehyde carries none of the glycoside.