Custards
These have been known for some time on the Continent as English creams; but latterly simply as creams - vanilla cream, lemon cream, chocolate cream, according to the flavour. One receipt will be enough. Lemon Custard.-Beat up the yolks of eight eggs to a strong white cream. Mix into this very slowly a pint of boiling hot cream, together with the zest and juice of two lemons, and sugar to taste. Stir this on the fire till it thickens-but do not boil it. Add also, when nearly ready, a wineglassful of sherry and a tablespoonful of brandy. Keep stirring it till it cools, and serve it in cups with grated nutmeg.
A wonderful flavour is given to these creams or custards by boiling in the cream or milk with which they are made a laurel-leaf-that is, not a bayleaf, but a leaf of the cherry laurel. Great care, however, must be used; for the cherry laurel is poisonous.
Dab AB.-Who ever heard of dab at a fashionable dinner or in a fine bill of fare? Nevertheless a dab-the French limande is better than any flounder; and as Mr. Bugg changed his name to Norfolk Howard, the poor little dab aspires to fame under the name of a Thames flounder, which is the best of all flounders. Let us give dab his due. His name is as plebeian as Snooks or Blogg; but he is an honest fish, with a good taste and a faculty of making himself agreeable in society which his friends with great names might well envy.
Kettner gives a straightforward boiled lemon custard and then, in the same breath, recommends infusing the cream with cherry laurel. That last suggestion is the reason this page cannot be followed as printed.
- Cherry laurel is the problemThe leaf of Prunus laurocerasus contains prunasin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the leaf is crushed, bruised or steeped in hot liquid. Kettner's own warning that it "is poisonous" is accurate, and no domestic method exists for judging how much cyanide a given leaf will yield into a pint of cream.
- The dose is unknowableGlycoside content varies with the variety, the age of the leaf and the season, and infusion time and temperature change the extraction. There is no safe quantity a home cook can measure, which is why laurel water disappeared from the confectioner's shelf while almond essence stayed.
- Bay is not a substitute for the flavour meant hereKettner is explicit that he does not mean the bay leaf of the soup pot. The flavour he wants is the bitter-almond note of benzaldehyde, and the whole point of the laurel is that it carries that note along with the poison. Use a current custard recipe if you want the dish.
- Imperial measuresHis pint is 20 fluid ounces, not 16. A wineglassful in Victorian usage is roughly 2 fluid ounces.
- "English creams"What he is describing is what French kitchens call crème anglaise — a stirred custard, thickened by egg yolk alone, with no starch and no baking. The "cups" he serves it in are small custard cups, and eight yolks to a pint makes a rich pouring-to-spooning consistency rather than a set custard.
- Acid and hot creamLemon juice added to scalded cream with eight yolks in it is a curdling risk quite apart from anything else; the instruction to stir it 'on the fire till it thickens--but do not boil it' is guarding against exactly that.
- The dab paragraphThe entry runs straight on into an unrelated note on the dab, a small flatfish. It is Kettner's dictionary format showing through, not part of the custard.
Kettner's remark that these were "known for some time on the Continent as English creams" is the mirror image of the English habit of calling the same preparation cr eam country credited the other with the stirred egg custard, which by the 1870s was a standard base for cold sweets. The laurel note is a survival from an older confectionery practice: before commercial almond essence, cooks got the bitter-almond flavour from bitter almonds, peach kernels or cherry laurel leaves, all of which owe that flavour to the same cyanogenic chemistry that makes them dangerous. Laurel water was well enough understood as a poison to have featured in an English murder trial in 1781, when John Donellan was convicted of killing his brother-in-law Sir Theodosius Boughton with it — a case still cited in nineteenth-century toxicology, which makes Kettner's cheerful "great care, however, must be used" all the more striking as a period attitude to risk in the kitchen.