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Imperial Cream
Put the strained juice of three lemons into a rather deep glass dish. Boil a quart of cream with the thin rind of a lemon, and pour it into a jug, stirring in at the same time, by degrees, eight ounces of finely-powdered sugar. Keep the cream stirred until it is nearly cold, and the sugar is quite dissolved, then add it to the strained juice, keeping the jug as high as possible, and mixing the juice and cream well together as it falls from the spout of the jug. This cream should be allowed several hours to set. Probable cost, 2s. 3d.
An acid-set cream in the tradition of the lemon posset — no gelatine, no eggs, nothing but cream, sugar and lemon juice doing the work. The whole thing turns on temperature.
- The hinge: let the cream coolThe recipe has you stir the cream until it is "nearly cold" and the sugar fully dissolved before it meets the juice. Follow that instruction rather than combining while the cream is still hot.
- QuantitiesCassell's quart is an imperial one, 40 fl oz, so about 1.14 litres or a little under 5 US cups of cream. Eight ounces of powdered sugar is a generous cup of caster sugar. Three lemons yield roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup of juice, which is what sets the whole quantity.
- Which creamYou need double or heavy cream at 36 per cent fat or higher. Single cream, half-and-half or anything labelled "light" will not thicken with acid alone and you will get a sweet lemon soup.
- "Finely-powdered sugar"In this book that means granulated sugar crushed fine, not modern icing sugar with its cornflour. Caster sugar is the direct equivalent; it dissolves in the warm cream without grittiness.
- The thin rindPare the zest in strips with no white pith attached; pith will make the cream bitter. The recipe does not say so explicitly, but the strips are best removed before the cream is combined with the juice.
- Pouring from a heightThis is deliberate aeration and mixing, not showmanship. The thin falling stream disperses the cream through the juice so the acid works evenly instead of setting in lumps where it lands.
- Setting time"Several hours" is the minimum; overnight in the refrigerator is better, and the original of course assumed a cold larder. The cream firms to a soft spoonable set, never to a sliceable jelly.
- Yield and servingEnough for eight to ten small glasses or one deep glass dish. Serve cold, in the dish it set in, with thin crisp biscuits or sponge fingers.
- On the cost line2s. 3d. is the Victorian retail estimate the book attached to most recipes so a housekeeper could budget. It is of no practical use now beyond telling you this was a dish for company.
Creams set with citrus rather than gelatine or eggs are an old strand of English confectionery, and the name "imperial cream" appears in English cookery books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the same principle as the lemon posset, itself descended from spiced curdled-milk drinks of the medieval and Tudor table. The name appears to be flourish rather than any royal connection: "imperial" was applied freely to rich dishes in the nineteenth century, as it was to biscuits, plums and measures. That the book still costs it out in shillings and pence is a reminder of who it was written for — a household with servants, a cold larder, and a quart of cream to spare on a pudding.