Home › Baked Puddings › Honeycomb Cream
Honeycomb Cream
Strain and sweeten liberally the juice of 2 large lemons and a Seville orange. Put it into a glass dish. Boil a pint and a half of thick cream. Pour it into a heated teapot. Put the glass dish containing the juice on the ground, and pour the cream on it very slowly, and from a good height, so as to froth it well. Let it stand until cold. It should be well stirred at table before serving. This is the old-fashioned way of preparing honeycomb cream, but a better plan is to whisk the white of an egg and a little sugar with the cream; the, as the froth rises, to take it off and lay it upon the lemon juice until all the cream is used. Honeycomb cream should be made the day before it is wanted, and put at once into the dish in which it is to remain. Time, an hour or more to prepare.
A syllabub-type dish in all but name: sweetened citrus juice at the bottom of a glass bowl, a deep froth of cream above it. Nothing is baked despite the section it sits in, and the whole thing depends on how much air you can beat or pour into the cream.
- The hinge: aeration, not thickeningThe froth is the dish. In the first method the height of the pour and the narrow teapot spout are what whip air into the hot cream as it falls; a short pour from a jug gives you a bowl of sweet cream and nothing else. The second method, lifting whipped froth off the surface in layers, is more reliable and is what most cooks will want to do.
- Thick cream and the pint"Thick cream" means double cream, around 48 per cent fat; US heavy cream is about 36 per cent and will still whip, though the higher-fat cream froths more stiffly and holds longer. A pint and a half in an English book of this period is 30 imperial fl oz, roughly 850 ml, or about 3 1/2 US cups.
- Seville orangeA bitter marmalade orange, in season only in January and February and sharply sour. Out of season, the usual stand-in is the juice of one sweet orange with a tablespoon of lemon or lime juice added to restore the acid edge.
- "Sweeten liberally"Unhelpfully vague, and it matters, because the acid layer has to stand up to a large volume of unsweetened cream. Start at 1/2 cup of caster or superfine sugar for the juice of two lemons and one orange, and taste for something distinctly too sweet on its own.
- Boiling the creamBring it just to the boil and no further. Cream held at a rolling boil in a heavy pan will catch and taste scorched, and the flavour carries straight through the finished dish.
- The raw egg whiteThe improved version whisks an uncooked white into the cream; the recipe does not say whether that cream is boiled first, and the whisking implies it is not. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurised egg white, sold in cartons, or leave the white out and simply whip the cream to soft peaks.
- Make it ahead, and in the serving dishThe instruction to make it the day before and never move it is sound: the froth will not survive being transferred. Use a wide, shallow glass bowl so the two layers show, and expect the froth to settle considerably overnight.
- Yield and serviceRoughly 3 3/4 cups of cream over the juice serves six to eight in small glasses or dessert bowls. The direction to stir it at table is deliberate; the curd and the froth are meant to be combined at the last moment, in front of the diners.