Home › The Principles of Cookery › Holstein Cream
Holstein Cream
Take the thin rind of a lemon, and let it soak by the side of the fire in a pint of cream for half an hour, and afterwards bring it slowly to a boil. Mix a tea-spoonful of ground rice very smoothly with the strained juice of the lemon and a little cold milk. Stir it into the boiling liquid, add two table-spoonfuls of sugar, and boil five minutes longer, stirring all the time. Slice a small spongecake, and lay it in a glass dish, pour the cream over, and garnish according to taste. If milk be used instead of cream, double the above quantity of ground rice will be required. Probable cost, 6d., if made with milk. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A lemon-infused rice-flour cream poured hot over sponge cake and set in a glass dish — essentially a trifle without the wine. The only tricky part is the acid meeting the hot dairy.
- The hinge: lemon juice in hot creamLemon juice can curdle scalded dairy. Have the ground rice, juice and cold milk slurried perfectly smooth, pour it into the cream in a thin stream while stirring hard, and keep stirring for the full five minutes. Cream, with its higher fat, holds together better than milk; if you use milk, expect it to look grainier.
- An imperial pintCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, about 2 1/2 US cups. Use the same volume of heavy or whipping cream.
- "By the side of the fire"This means a gentle infusion, not a simmer — the cream should stay hot to the touch but never bubble. On a modern hob, the lowest setting for 30 minutes, or warm the cream, cover it, and leave it off the heat while the peel steeps.
- Ground riceA plain rice starch. Ground rice is traditionally a slightly coarser grind than modern rice flour, though fine rice flour sold for baking or in Asian groceries will substitute; not sweet glutinous rice flour. A teaspoon in a pint is a very light set; the mixture thickens to a pouring custard, not a pudding.
- Lemon rind"Thin rind" means pared zest with no white pith, which turns the cream bitter. A vegetable peeler gives the right thickness. The recipe never says when the peel comes out — the only straining it mentions is of the juice — so lift or strain it from the cream yourself before the rice mixture goes in.
- Sponge cakeA plain unfilled sponge, day-old or slightly stale, absorbs the cream best. Trifle sponges or ladyfingers work; a modern frosted layer cake does not.
- Chilling and servingPour hot over the cake. The recipe gives no chilling instruction or time; if you do chill it, the sponge softens and the cream firms. It says only to "garnish according to taste" — candied peel, toasted almonds or a spoonful of preserve all suit. Sufficient for three or four persons, as written.
- "Probable cost, 6d."Sixpence, in pre-decimal British currency — a costing figure for a Victorian housekeeper's accounts, of no use as a modern estimate.
Cassell's fills its dessert chapters with dishes named for places — Holstein, Bavarian, Danish — where the name signals a style rather than any documented local origin. Holstein lent its name to a good many nineteenth-century recipes built on cream. What the recipe actually shows is how English cooks thickened creams: ground rice was the cheap, reliable starch of the mid-Victorian larder, and the note that milk requires double the quantity is the sort of practical economy Cassell's offered to households that could not spend on cream every week. The construction — sliced sponge in a glass dish, hot flavoured cream poured over — belongs to the same family as the trifle, minus the sherry.