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Italian Cream
Soak a box of gelatine in one pint cold water. Then add one quart nice cream, season with fresh lemons, sweeten to your taste, beat well together, and set away in a cool place. When hard, eat with cream, flavored with wine.--Mrs. A. B.
A molded gelatin cream in the older style, with almost every quantity left to the cook. The success of the dish rests on the gelatin being fully dissolved before it meets the cream.
- A box of gelatineBoxes were not standardised, but a common size was around 1 oz, roughly four modern 1/4-oz envelopes, or about three tablespoons of powder. At modern rates that is more than enough to set the three pints of liquid here, giving a firm, sliceable set; use three envelopes if you want it softer and spoonable.
- Soaking is not dissolvingThe pint of cold water only swells the granules. Warm the softened gelatin gently over low heat or in a bowl of hot water until it is completely clear with no grains visible, then let it cool to lukewarm. Poured in hot it will thin the cream; poured in cold it will set in threads.
- The lemon"Season with fresh lemons" means juice and, if you like, finely grated zest. Two lemons for the full quantity is about right. Add the juice to the sweetened gelatin rather than directly to the cream, and stir it in gradually, since acid dropped into cream can make it grainy.
- Sweeten to your tasteStart at about 3/4 cup sugar for a quart of cream plus a pint of water, and dissolve it in the warm gelatin so no crystals remain; sugar dissolves only slowly in cold cream.
- Beat well togetherThis is whisked, not whipped to peaks. Beat only until the mixture is uniform, then pour into a mold or a bowl. Overbeaten cream that then sets will hold a foamy, slightly coarse texture.
- Set away in a cool placeA larder then, a refrigerator now. Allow four to six hours, or overnight for a molded shape. To unmold, dip the mold briefly in warm water and invert onto a chilled plate.
- The wine creamThe recipe calls only for cold cream flavored with wine; a spoonful or two of sherry, Madeira or a sweet white wine suits, and it may be lightly sweetened if you wish. Nothing in the text calls for whipping it.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts of finished cream, serving eight to ten.
Recipes titled "Italian cream" run through English and American cookbooks from the eighteenth century onward, and the name refers less to any single Italian dish than to the fashion for continental-style creams and blancmanges on genteel tables; the family resemblance to panna cotta is real but not a documented descent. What marks this version as late-nineteenth-century American is the box of gelatine: until commercial refined gelatin became cheap and reliable, a cook wanting this texture had to boil calves' feet for hours and clarify the result, or else soak and dissolve isinglass. By the time Housekeeping in Old Virginia was collected from Virginia households in the 1870s, contributors like Mrs. A. B. could assume a packaged product and write a whole dessert in four lines, leaving sugar and lemon to the cook's judgment in the manner typical of recipes traded among women who already knew what the dish should taste like.