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Sack Cream
Beat the yolks of two eggs, and mix with them gradually half a pint of cream and half a pint of lukewarm milk. Add a little sugar, a flavouring of grated lemon-rind, and a glassful of sherry. Stir the cream over the fire till it begins to thicken, but be very careful that it does not curdle. Serve it in custard-glasses, with a little powdered cinnamon sprinkled over the top. Send ratafias or other sweet biscuits to table with the cream. Time, five or six minutes to heat the cream. Probable cost, exclusive of the sherry, 1s. 4d. Sufficient for five or six glasses.
A thin stirred custard, closer to a drinkable pouring cream than a set one, and the sherry is the whole point of it.
- Sack means sherry"Sack" was the old English name for fortified white wine from Spain and the Canaries, and by the time this book was printed the word survived mainly in dish names. The recipe itself simply says sherry; a dry or medium amontillado suits it better than a cream sherry, since sugar is added separately.
- The measuresHalf a pint imperial is 10 fl oz, so the recipe uses 10 oz cream and 10 oz milk, about 1¼ cups each. A "glassful" of sherry is genuinely vague here: a Victorian wine glass held roughly 2 to 2½ fl oz, and that is a sensible reading, but the book does not say.
- Two yolks will not set itTwo yolks to a pint of liquid (the cream and milk together) gives a very loose custard that coats a spoon thinly. It is meant to be sipped or spooned from a glass, not turned out.
- The hinge: keep it under a simmerEgg yolks curdle from about 180F upward, and the alcohol and acid in the sherry make the mixture less forgiving still. Cook it in a bowl over barely simmering water, stir constantly, and pull it at 170-175F when it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.
- When to add the sherryAdding the wine at the start, as written, means five or six minutes of heat driving off aroma. Folding it in off the heat at the end keeps the sherry character sharper; either works, but the second is easier on the eggs.
- RatafiasSmall hard almond macaroons, historically flavoured with bitter almond. Amaretti are the direct modern equivalent, and any crisp almond biscuit serves.
- Yield and servingFive or six small custard glasses, chilled or barely warm, with cinnamon dusted over just before they go to table so it does not sink.
Sack was the standard English term for fortified wine imported from Jerez and the Canary Islands, familiar from Elizabethan drinking and still attached to dish names centuries after the word had otherwise dropped out of use. Its ancestor is the sack posset, a hot mixture of cream, eggs, sugar, spice and wine that was a fixture of English celebration cookery from the sixteenth century onward and was often served at weddings; the wine was expected to curdle the milk into a soft mass beneath a foamy top. This Victorian version has been tamed into a smooth stirred custard, with curdling now something to be prevented rather than the object of the exercise. The note of the price -- 1s. 4d., "exclusive of the sherry" -- is characteristic of Cassell's, with its eye on the middle-class household running to a budget, and quietly acknowledges that the wine was the expensive part.