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Spanish Cream
Boil, till dissolved, one ounce of gelatine in three pints of milk. Then add the yolks of six eggs, beaten light, and mixed with two teacups sugar. Put again on the fire and stir till it thickens. Then set it aside to cool, and meantime beat the six whites very stiff and stir them into the custard when almost cold. Pour into moulds. Flavor to your taste, before adding the whites.--Mrs. W.
Spanish Cream.
Dissolve half a box gelatine in half a pint milk. Boil one quart milk, and while boiling beat six eggs separately and very light. Mix the yolks with the boiling milk, and when it thickens add the gelatine. Sweeten and season to the taste. Pour all while hot on the whites of the eggs. Pour into moulds.--Mrs.
Two versions of the same moulded gelatin custard, both from contributors to the same book. Both are built on beaten egg whites that never reach a cooking temperature, which is where the trouble lies.
- Why the cautionIn the first version the stiff whites go into a custard that has already been set aside to cool, so they are eaten raw, and nothing in the method ever brings them back up to a safe temperature. Raw egg white carries a risk of Salmonella. Use a current recipe if you want to make a Spanish cream.
- The second version is no saferPouring hot custard onto the whites looks like a fix, but there is no way to know the mixture holds a pasteurising temperature long enough to be safe; treat the foam as uncooked.
- "Half a box" of gelatineThere is no fixed answer. A nineteenth-century box of gelatine held somewhere between about one and two ounces depending on the maker, and the strength of the product varied, so "half a box" and the "one ounce" of the first version are not necessarily the same dose. Any attempt to convert this to modern powdered gelatin is guesswork.
- Two teacups sugarThe book does not define its teacup; it is usually reckoned at about three-quarters of a modern measuring cup, which would make roughly a cup and a half of sugar for three pints of milk. The second recipe gives no quantity at all and leaves sweetening to taste.
- FlavoringVanilla, lemon rind, bitter-almond, sherry and rosewater are all found as flavourings for creams of this kind, though neither recipe names one. The first recipe directs that the flavour go in before the whites.
- YieldThree pints of milk plus eggs and sugar would fill a mould of about two quarts; the second version, at two and a half pints of milk in all, is somewhat smaller.
Spanish cream was one of the standard moulded desserts of the American gelatin era, closely related to blancmange and to the French bavarois, and its appeal was theatrical: because the whipped whites are lighter than the custard, the mixture separates as it chills into a clear jelly at the bottom of the mould and a pale foam on top. The Spanish attribution is traditional rather than documented. Its presence here, twice, in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from the receipts of Virginia housekeepers, the contributions signed with a name or initial) reflects how readily packaged gelatine had been taken up in the domestic kitchen — the previous generation had to make their own from calves' feet or isinglass.