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Almond Italian Cream
To Italian Cream add one cup almonds which have been blanched, chopped, and browned and two tablespoons lemon juice.
This is a variation line, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's Italian Cream in front of you. A few notes on the additions and on how they behave in a cream base.
- Read the base recipe firstItalian Cream in books of this period is a sweetened cream, often whipped and set with gelatine or isinglass, and in some versions relying on acid; the base entry will say which. Everything below assumes you are working from that entry; the quantities here are additions to it, not a full ingredient list.
- One cup of almondsA cup of whole blanched almonds is roughly 5 oz; chopped, it will still measure close to a cup. Buy blanched almonds if you can, or pour boiling water over raw ones, stand two minutes, and slip the skins off while warm.
- Browned means toastedToast the chopped almonds dry in a 350F oven for 8 to 12 minutes, shaking the pan once or twice, until they smell nutty and are pale gold. They darken after they come out, so pull them early, and cool them completely before they go near the cream or they will slacken it.
- The lemon juice is structuralThe lemon juice -- Two tablespoons of acid in a cream base may do more than flavour it; in some cream desserts of this kind the acid is what thickens the cream. Without the base recipe to hand it is not clear which role it plays here. If the base is an acid-set cream, add the juice gradually to cold cream while stirring so that it thickens evenly.
- Fold the nuts in lastAdd the almonds after the cream has taken up the lemon juice and is holding its shape. Folded in earlier they weigh the whipped cream down and you lose the volume you just built.
- ChillingGive the mold at least four hours in the refrigerator, longer if the base uses gelatine. A gelatine-set cream unmolds cleanly; an acid-set one is softer and is better served spooned from a dish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity for the base, so yield depends on the entry you are working from; if that base uses a pint of heavy cream, the finished cream with the almonds will serve six to eight in small dishes. It is rich, and the toasted almonds make it richer still.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, was a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook, and its dessert chapter is unusually long and unusually detailed about creams, custards and molds. "Italian cream" was a standard American dessert name through the nineteenth century, generally applied to a molded cream thickened with gelatine, isinglass or acid rather than to anything demonstrably Italian. Recipes of this kind travel in families, with a plain version followed by short variation lines like this one, each adding a flavouring or a nut, so that a cook could work up half a dozen desserts from a single technique. The pairing of toasted almonds with lemon is an old one in European confectionery.