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Italian Cream
Put a pint of cream and milk, in equal parts, into a saucepan, with loaf sugar according to taste, and the rind of a lemon, reserving the juice. Keep it boiling slowly until the lemon has imparted sufficient flavour, then strain it into a bowl, in order to mix freely with it the yolks of four eggs well beaten. Pour this mixture into a jug, and set the jug in boiling water. Take care that the contents do not boil; stir them till they become thick, then remove the cream from the fire, and when cool stir into it the lemon-juice and an ounce of dissolved isinglass. The cream must now be well whipped, and, if it is to be served in glasses, drained on a sieve, but if for a mould, fill the vessel with the cream when whipped, and set it in a cold place (on ice if possible) to set. Turn the cream out on a glass dish, and ornament with crystallised or preserved fruits. Time, from five to eight minutes to stir in the jug. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for a pint and a half.
A stirred lemon custard set with isinglass and whipped to lighten it — closer to a Victorian bavarois than to anything called cream today. Two things decide whether it works: keeping the custard below a simmer, and getting the gelatine quantity right.
- Never let it boilThe jug standing in boiling water is a bain-marie, and the warning is the whole recipe. Take the custard off at about 175-180F, when it coats the spoon; past that the yolks scramble and no amount of whipping will smooth it.
- Isinglass to gelatineIsinglass is dried sturgeon swim bladder, sold in leaves or shreds and dissolved in a little hot water. Its setting power varied a great deal between grades, so an ounce is not a reliable figure to convert; for a pint and a half of custard, modern practice is roughly 1½ envelopes of powdered gelatine (about 3½ teaspoons), bloomed and dissolved. Err on the low side if you want it spoonable rather than rubbery.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in hard cones, crushed before use. Plain granulated sugar is the equivalent; 2 to 3 oz suits a pint of cream and milk.
- Lemon rind, then juiceThe rind goes in to infuse while hot — pare it thin, with no white pith. The juice waits until the custard is cool, and acid stirred into a hot yolk-and-milk mixture is liable to curdle it.
- When to whipWhip once the mixture is cold and just beginning to thicken at the edges, not while it is still liquid and not after it has set.
- Glasses or mouldDraining the whipped cream on a sieve for glass service sheds the loose liquid so the foam holds its shape. For a mould, pour it in immediately after whipping and chill at least four hours; dip the mould briefly in warm water to turn it out.
- YieldA pint and a half fills six to eight small glasses, or one 1½-pint mould.
- Timings and cost"Five to eight minutes to stir in the jug" assumes the water is already at a rolling boil; over a modern double boiler it may well take longer. The 2s. 6d. is the book's estimate of what the ingredients would cost.
"Italian cream" appears in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward and rarely has much to do with Italy; the name attached itself to whipped, gelatine-set creams in the same loose way that "Dutch sauce" and "Spanish onion" did, and the recipes are best read as an English confectioner's genre rather than a borrowing. What holds this one together is isinglass, the collagen from sturgeon and other fish bladders, much of it imported from Russia through the nineteenth century and prized because it set clear and had no meaty flavour — the alternative was calf's-foot jelly, which meant a day of boiling and skimming. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s for households with a cook but not necessarily a pastry chef, gives the method in one dense paragraph and assumes the reader knows what a jug set in boiling water is for. Branded sheet and shred gelatine, from Nelson's and Cox's, was already on sale in Britain by the 1870s; the granulated, standardised product of the following decades made this kind of dish routine and then made it old-fashioned.