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Stone Cream
Put a little apricot, plum, or cherry jam into a glass dish. Grate upon it the rind of a lemon, and add the strained juice. Pour over it as much liquid blancmange nearly cold as will cover it. Serve the cream when stiff and cold, and ornament the surface with a little pink sugar, knobs of red currant jelly, or strips of preserved fruit, or blanched almonds. The blancmange may be made with isinglass, gelatine, or fine arrowroot.
A layered Victorian cold sweet that depends entirely on getting the blancmange to the right temperature before it is poured. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: "nearly cold"The blancmange must be cool enough to be thick and barely pourable, but not yet setting. Too hot and it melts the jam and muddies the layers; too cool and it sets in lumps rather than a smooth cap.
- Blancmange, 19th-century senseIn this period usually a sweetened cream or milk set with a gelling agent, often flavoured with almond or lemon; starch-thickened versions existed alongside it, and this recipe allows arrowroot. As a modern working quantity, roughly 500 ml of cream and milk, 50 g sugar, and one 7 g sachet of powdered gelatine gives a set firm enough to hold its shape.
- IsinglassDried fish swim bladder, classically sturgeon, once the standard clear setting agent. It is now hard to find for kitchen use outside brewing suppliers; use leaf or powdered gelatine at modern ratios rather than trying to convert the old weights, which varied widely in strength.
- Arrowroot versionIf you gel with arrowroot instead, it must be boiled to thicken and will set softer and cloudier than a gelatine cream, more like a flummery. About 30 g arrowroot per 500 ml liquid gives a spoonable rather than sliceable cream.
- Acid and the setThe strained lemon juice sits directly beneath the gelatine layer and will weaken it slightly at the join. Keep the juice to one lemon and let the dish set a full 4 hours, preferably overnight, before disturbing it.
- Pink sugarThe recipe does not say how it was tinted; cochineal was the usual colourant in period cookery books. Any coloured sanding sugar does the same job; add it just before serving, since it dissolves and bleeds on a damp surface.
- Blanched almondsSweet almonds only, dropped into boiling water for a minute and slipped from their skins. Shred them lengthwise for the traditional spiked finish.
- YieldA quantity built on 500 ml of blancmange fills a medium glass dish and serves four to six. It does not travel or unmould; serve from the dish it set in.
Stone cream appears in English recipe books and stayed in the repertoire through the Victorian era as one of the easiest of the "cold sweets" — a spoonful of preserve, a sharp layer of lemon, and a cap of set cream, requiring no baking and no moulding. The name is unexplained in the sources; it is variously said to refer to the stoneware jars such creams were once made in and to the stiff, stone-smooth surface of the finished dish, neither of which is documented. Its place in Cassell's reflects how such books taught construction by layers: the same lesson in temperature and setting agents that underlies charlottes, jellies and moulded creams, reduced to something a household cook could put together with a jar of jam and whatever gelling agent was to hand.