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Russian Cream
Cover 1/2 box of gelatine with cold water and soak one hour. Put 1 quart of milk into double boiler, and when boiling add the gelatine, 1 cupful sugar beaten with the yolks of 4 eggs, and a little salt; cook until it begins to curdle; then cool, and stir into it the beaten whites of 4 eggs and a teaspoonful of vanilla. Put into cups and serve cold with whipped cream. When turned out of the cups, the jelly should be 1 inch thick on top.
A gelatine-set custard of the Bavarian cream family, thin enough to be spooned from cups rather than unmoulded whole. Two things decide whether it works: the temperature at which you stop cooking the custard, and how you handle the raw whites.
- Read "begins to curdle" as a warning, not a targetThe custard is done when it coats a spoon and reads 170-175F on a thermometer; the moment it actually curdles the eggs have scrambled. Pull it from the heat at the first sign of thickening and strain it into a cold bowl.
- Half a box of gelatineConversions vary by brand and period, but a box is often reckoned at about 1 oz, which would make half a box roughly 1/2 oz, or two modern envelopes (about 14 g). Treat that as an estimate. It gives a soft, spoonable set for a quart of milk; for a firmer turn-out, use a little more.
- SoakingAn hour of soaking is generous but harmless. Twenty minutes in about 1/2 cup cold water is enough to bloom granulated gelatine fully. Add it to the hot milk off direct heat and stir until no grains remain on the spoon.
- The raw whitesThe whites go into cooled custard and are never heated, which is the one point in the recipe modern practice has changed. Use pasteurized whites, particularly if serving anyone vulnerable; folding them into hot custard will neither make them safe nor keep the foam.
- Timing the foldStir the whites in when the custard is cool but not yet setting -- syrupy, about the thickness of unwhipped cream. Too warm and the foam collapses; too cold and you get lumps of jelly through the mixture.
- The inch of jelly on topThe last line describes the result, not a step. Standing in the cups, the mixture separates: a clear gelatine layer sinks and a foamy layer rises, so when unmoulded the denser jelly sits on top. Chill undisturbed for at least four hours to get it.
- VesselA double boiler here means a bowl or pan over simmering water, not touching it. Direct heat with this much sugar and yolk will catch on the bottom.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, filling eight to ten custard cups. Serve cold with lightly sweetened whipped cream.
"Russian cream" was one of a family of gelatine-set custards -- Bavarian cream, Spanish cream, charlotte russe -- that filled the dessert chapters of American cookbooks as commercial granulated gelatine became cheap and reliable from the 1890s. Before that, cooks made their own jelly stock from calves' feet or isinglass, a day's work; a box of prepared gelatine turned the same dish into an afternoon's. The Russian label appears to be decorative rather than geographic; it is sometimes linked to the nineteenth-century vogue for things a la russe that followed the adoption of Russian-style service, in which courses came to the table in sequence rather than all at once, but that connection is not documented. The distinctive touch here is the separated layer: a band of clear jelly over a pale foam.