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Snow Cheese
Blanch an ounce and a half of sweet almonds, pound them in a mortar, and add a table-spoonful of ratafia and two table-spoonfuls of rosewater. Stir the paste into a quart of thick cream, and add the strained juice of three lemons and as much white sugar as will sweeten the cream pleasantly. Whisk the mixture till it begins to thicken, then pour it into a mould, and set it in a cool place. In twelve hours it will be ready for turning out.
An uncooked cream "cheese" set by acid rather than heat or gelatine. Cassell's assumes you know what kind of mould is meant, and that is the one thing the recipe depends on.
- Use a draining mouldConsider a draining mould -- the recipe says only "a mould". Since nothing is cooked and no gelatine is used, some cooks read this as a draining shape: a perforated mould, a heart-shaped coeur à la crème mould, or a fine sieve lined with damp muslin, stood over a bowl and left to drip in the refrigerator. A plain mould risks the mixture sitting in its own whey, though a well-whisked acidulated cream may set in one.
- A quart of thick creamIn a British book of this date, a quart is 40 fl oz, so roughly 1.1 litres. "Thick cream" means double cream, 48 per cent fat; whipping cream at 35 per cent gives a looser curd that drains to very little.
- RatafiaA sweetened almond- or fruit-kernel liqueur. Amaretto or a good noyau is the closest substitute; a tablespoon of almond extract is not, being many times stronger.
- RosewaterBuy food-grade rosewater from a Middle Eastern or Indian grocer rather than a pharmacy or a baking-aisle "rose flavour". Strengths vary, so taste before committing the second spoonful.
- Blanching and poundingPour boiling water over the almonds, stand two minutes, and slip the skins off. A small food processor does the pounding, but stop while there is still a little grain; ground to a butter, the almonds release oil and streak the cream.
- Whisking with acidAdd the lemon juice gradually while whisking and stop as soon as the mixture holds a soft ribbon. Cream plus acid thickens fast, and taken further it separates into grains and whey that will not come back together.
- Sugar"As much as will sweeten pleasantly" is left to the cook; 3 to 4 oz (75-100 g) is a reasonable starting point for this quantity, adjusted to taste. Use caster or icing sugar so it dissolves in the cold mixture.
- Timing and yieldTwelve hours in a "cool place" means overnight in the refrigerator. It serves eight to ten, turned out onto a dish and eaten within a day or two with soft fruit.
"Snow cheese" belongs to a long English family of cream dishes that borrow the vocabulary of the dairy without going near a cheese vat: lemon cheese, curds and cream, and the whipped snows and syllabubs that filled the middle of an eighteenth-century dessert table. "Snow" in English cookery normally denotes the whipped white appearance, though the French coeur à la crème, in which soured cream is hung to drip as a fresh curd cheese would be, offers a suggestive parallel. The almond, ratafia and rosewater flavouring is older still, a survival of the medieval and Tudor taste for perfumed almond milk that lingered in English sweet cookery well after savoury dishes had abandoned it. Cassell's places the recipe in a reference dictionary aimed at late-Victorian households with a cool larder and access to genuinely thick cream, two things the dish cannot do without.