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Pistachio Creams
6 ounces pistachio nuts 1 pint cream 2 tablespoons rosewater 1 ounce sugar Blanch the nuts, and pound them well with the rosewater, until the consistency of paste. Add the cream, and put into a small saucepan with the sugar, and let it just boil. Allow it to cool, and put it into jelly or custard glasses. Serve cold.
A cream in the older English sense: flavoured cream boiled briefly and poured into small glasses, not a set custard or ice. It stays pourable, and that is correct.
- The hinge: do not overboil"Let it just boil" means bring it barely to the boil and pull it off. There is no egg and no starch here, so prolonged boiling only reduces the cream and risks it catching or splitting against the nut paste. Stir constantly over medium heat.
- MeasuresIf the pint is read as an American pint that is 2 cups; if the book is English and means an imperial pint it is 20 fl oz, about 2 1/2 cups. One ounce of sugar is about 2 tablespoons. Six ounces of shelled pistachios is roughly 1 1/3 cups. Use heavy or whipping cream.
- Blanching the nutsCover shelled pistachios with boiling water for a minute, drain, and rub off the papery skins in a towel. The skins are what turn the finished cream a dull brown instead of green.
- Pounding, without a mortarA food processor does the mortar's work: grind the blanched nuts with the rosewater to a smooth damp paste, scraping down often. If any grit remains, pass the finished cream through a fine sieve before chilling.
- Rosewater varies enormouslyDomestic and older distilled rosewaters were often weaker than modern concentrated food-grade rosewater, so two tablespoons may be far too much. Start with two teaspoons, taste, and add more. Rose flavour that is too strong reads as soap.
- ColourEven well-blanched pistachios give a pale ivory-green, not the vivid green of commercial pistachio desserts, which is usually owed to added colouring or other nuts rather than to pistachio itself.
- Chilling and yieldCool to room temperature, then refrigerate at least three hours. It will thicken slightly but remain spoonable rather than firm. Fills six small custard or sherry glasses; serve within two days.
A "cream" in English cookery books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could mean a flavoured cream scalded with sugar and set out in little glasses; other creams of the period, such as ratafia and lemon, used a similar method, though many were also thickened with eggs or set with isinglass. Rosewater was a common sweet flavouring in Europe and the Middle East before vanilla became widespread in the nineteenth century. Pistachios were an expensive import, generally traced to Sicily and the Levant, which is why six ounces was worth pounding by hand.