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Apricot Cream
Ingredients.
Half a pint of Apricot Purée.
One gill of Syrup.
Half a pint of whipped Cream.
Three ounces of Castor Sugar.
One ounce of French Gelatine.
One teaspoonful of Lemon-juice.
Take a tin of apricots and strain them from the syrup, pass them through a hair-sieve. Take half a pint of this purée, add the sugar, and mix lightly with half a pint of double cream whipped. Dissolve the gelatine with a gill of the syrup you have strained from the apricots, add lemon-juice, and strain into the cream. Decorate a mould according to taste, set the mould in ice, pour in the cream, and set in ice till quite cold, then turn out and serve.
A cold moulded cream of the bavarois family, despite its place among the hot puddings. Two things need translating: the imperial measures and the gelatine, which is far stronger now than the leaf sold in 1900.
- Gelatine, the critical adjustmentOne ounce of gelatine to about a pint and a quarter of mixture would give a firm, sliceable block by modern standards. Today's powdered gelatine sets roughly a pint of liquid per quarter ounce (about 2 teaspoons). For this quantity, a little over a quarter ounce of powder, or the leaf equivalent given on the packet, gives a cream that just holds its shape when turned out.
- Imperial volumesHalf an imperial pint is 10 fl oz (1¼ US cups); a gill is 5 fl oz (a generous half cup). So you need 10 fl oz apricot purée, 10 fl oz double cream measured before whipping, and 5 fl oz of the drained syrup.
- Castor sugar and French gelatineCastor sugar is superfine or caster sugar; ordinary granulated will not dissolve fully in an unheated purée. "French gelatine" referred to gelatine in sheet or leaf form of the kind imported from France; how its strength compared with other grades then sold is not clear.
- Hair sieveA hair sieve was a fine drum sieve of woven horsehair. A nylon or fine stainless sieve does the same work, or blitz the drained apricots and then push them through to remove skin fragments.
- Dissolving the gelatineSoften the gelatine in a little cold liquid first, then warm the gill of apricot syrup and stir until fully clear. Let it cool to blood heat before straining it into the purée and cream, or it will slacken the whipped cream and cause streaks.
- Setting"Set the mould in ice" means packed round with crushed ice. The refrigerator does the job: three to four hours for a small mould, longer for one over a pint. To turn out, dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a chilled plate.
- Decorating the mouldOne period method was to line a chilled mould with a thin layer of clear jelly, press in halved apricots or angelica while it was tacky, and set that before the cream went in. Skip it and the cream is no worse, only plainer.
- YieldAbout 1¼ pints of mixture, serving six in a moulded shape or eight in small glasses.
Cold moulded creams stiffened with gelatine were the backbone of the Victorian and Edwardian sweet course, descended from the French bavarois and the older blancmanges, and their whole appeal lay in the shape: copper and tin moulds were fluted, turreted and hinged so that a cook could send a purée to table looking architectural. What dates this particular recipe is its opening instruction, "Take a tin of apricots." Commercially canned fruit had become cheap and reliable by the turn of the century. The placement of a plainly cold cream in a chapter of hot puddings and soufflés may simply be a slip of arrangement, of a kind not uncommon in cookery books of the period.