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Ratafia Cream
Boil three or four laurel, nectarine, or peach-leaves in a cupful of cream for three or four minutes. Strain this, and mix with it a pint of thick cream, add the yolks of three eggs well beaten, and stir the mixture over a gentle fire till it begins to thicken. Pour it out, let it get cold, and before serving sprinkle some "hundreds and thousands" over it. If preferred, milk may be used instead of cream. Or rasp the rind of a lemon and a Seville orange, or, if preferred, two lemons, upon two ounces of sugar. Put this into a bowl, and strain the juice of the fruit upon it. When the sugar is dissolved add a pint of thick cream, a quarter of a pint of ratafia or noyeau, and a quarter of a pint of light wine. Whisk the mixture thoroughly, and serve in glasses.
Two separate creams are given here under one name. The first is flavoured by boiling laurel or stone-fruit leaves in cream, and that method is the reason this page carries a warning.
- Laurel leaves are the problem"Laurel" in a Victorian English kitchen means cherry laurel, Prunus laurocerasus, not bay. Its leaves contain prunasin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the leaf is bruised, chopped or steeped in warm liquid. This is the source of the almond scent the recipe is after, and it is also the toxin.
- Peach and nectarine leaves are the same chemistryThe alternatives offered are no safer in principle. Leaves and kernels of Prunus species are cyanogenic, and the flavour and the hazard come from the same compound.
- No dose control"Three or four leaves" in a cupful of cream gives no way to know how much glycoside is present. Leaf size, age and how much they were crushed all change the yield. The recipe does strain the leaves out and dilute the infusion into a further pint of cream, but straining removes only the leaves, not what has already dissolved out of them.
- NoyeauNoyau (here "noyeau") was traditionally a liqueur flavoured with crushed stone-fruit kernels, and older domestic versions carried the same cyanide risk. Bottled products sold under the name today are flavoured to modern food-safety limits, but a home-made nineteenth-century noyau was not.
- The second variation is a different dishThe lemon-and-Seville-orange cream that follows contains no laurel and no leaf infusion at all: it is a whisked liqueur cream in the syllabub family. If a ratafia cream is wanted, work from a current recipe rather than adapting the first method.
- Units, for reading the pageA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, and "a quarter of a pint" is a gill, 5 fl oz. "Hundreds and thousands" are nonpareil sugar sprinkles, unchanged.
Ratafia was the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English name for an almond- or kernel-flavoured cordial, and by extension for anything tasting of it — ratafia biscuits, ratafia cream, the small almond macaroons still sold under the name. The leaves of cherry laurel, peach and nectarine give a similar almond scent, and "laurel water" appears as a flavouring in respectable English cookery books over a long period. Its danger was not unknown: the 1781 trial of John Donellan, convicted of poisoning his brother-in-law Sir Theodosius Boughton with laurel water, was a celebrated case, and medical writers in the nineteenth century warned against culinary use. That the method is still printed here shows how slowly a familiar flavouring leaves the domestic repertoire, and the second, liqueur-based version on the same page shows the direction the tradition eventually took.