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Italian Cream
Ingredients.
Yolks of four Eggs.
Half a pint of Milk.
Half a pint of Double Cream.
One ounce of Castor Sugar.
One ounce of melted Gelatine.
One wineglassful of Curaçoa. (Or half a wineglassful of Brandy and half a wineglassful of Sherry.) Make a custard with the eggs and milk; add the sugar, gelatine, and curaçoa. When cool, mix in the cream whipped; stir all together, and mould.
A gelatine-set custard cream — essentially a bavarois — from a British book, so the measures are imperial. Nothing here is difficult, but the gelatine quantity is the one figure worth thinking about before you start.
- The gelatine is ambiguous"One ounce of melted Gelatine" can mean an ounce by weight of dry gelatine, dissolved before use, or an ounce by volume (2 tablespoons) of gelatine already melted with water. An ounce of dry gelatine to a pint of liquid would set to a rubbery block; for comparison, modern practice is roughly 7-10 g of powdered gelatine per pint of liquid for a cream that just holds its shape when turned out. Judge it accordingly rather than trusting the figure.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint here is 10 fl oz, so the finished mixture is about a pint of custard and cream. A wineglassful is about 2 fl oz.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar. Granulated works, since it dissolves in the hot custard anyway.
- CuraçoaCuraçao, the orange liqueur; Grand Marnier or Cointreau stands in. The brandy-and-sherry alternative given in the recipe is a straight substitution, not an addition.
- The custardYolks and milk only, no flour, so it thickens between 175 and 180F and scrambles not far above that. Cook it over low heat or in a bain-marie until it coats the back of a spoon, then strain.
- Order of workStir the dissolved gelatine into the custard while it is still warm, then cool the mixture to about blood heat before folding in the whipped cream. Too hot and the cream collapses; too cold and the gelatine sets in strings.
- Whipping the creamDouble cream at 48% fat whips very quickly. Take it only to soft peaks — a firm whip will turn grainy once folded and chilled.
- Moulding and turning outLightly oil the mould with a flavourless oil. Chill at least four hours, preferably overnight, and dip the mould briefly in hot water to release.
- YieldAbout a pint of mixture, which serves four to six in a single mould or six small ones.
"Italian cream" is one of a family of gelatine-set cream sweets that fill the cold-sweet chapters of nineteenth-century British cookery books, alongside Bavarian cream, Swedish cream, Russian cream and a dozen others whose national labels indicate little more than a fashion for foreign-sounding names on the menu card. In construction it is a bavarois: egg custard, dissolved gelatine, whipped cream, a flavouring, set in a shaped mould and turned out. Such dishes belonged to the era when commercially refined sheet and powdered gelatine were increasingly displacing the long boiling of calves' feet or isinglass, putting moulded creams within reach of any well-run kitchen with an ice chest; the ornamental copper mould, and the cook's ability to unmould cleanly before the dining room, were the whole point of the exercise. The curaçao is characteristic too — orange liqueur was often said to be a favoured perfume for a plain cream, with brandy and sherry offered here as an alternative.