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Lemon Creams, Very Good
INGREDIENTS for 12 glasses.-1 pint of cream, 2 dozen sweet almonds, 3 glasses of sherry, the rind and juice of 2 lemons, sugar to taste. AVERAGE COST, 23. 6d. INGREDIENTS for 12 glasses.—1 pint of cream, 2 dozen sweet almonds, 3 glasses of sherry, the rind and juice of 2 lemons, sugar to taste. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 6d.
Blanch and chop the almonds and put them into a jug with the cream: in another jug put the sherry, lemon-rind, strained juice and sufficient pounded sugar to sweeten the whole nicely. Pour rapidly from one jug to the other till the mixture is well frothed: then pour it into jellyglasses, omitting the lemon-rind. This is a very cool and delicious sweet for summer and may be made less rich by omitting LEMON CREAMS. the almonds and substituting orange or raisin wine for the sherry.
TIME.-Altogether hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
This is a whipt syllabub under a Victorian name: no cooking, no gelatine, just cream frothed against sweetened, acidulated wine. The whole thing lives or dies on temperature and on how fast you pour.
- The hinge: everything ice cold, poured fastChill the cream, the wine mixture and the jugs thoroughly. Lemon juice and sherry will curdle warm cream into grainy curds rather than a stable foam, and the rapid pouring is what aerates it — a slow trickle simply thins the cream.
- What "cream" means hereUse heavy or whipping cream (36 per cent or more). Modern single cream or half-and-half will froth and then collapse within minutes; ultra-pasteurised cream also holds air less willingly.
- MeasuresThe pint is an imperial one, 20 fl oz, so 2 1/2 US cups. A Victorian wine glass is roughly 2 fl oz, making "3 glasses of sherry" about 6 fl oz — a generous but workable ratio against 20 oz of cream.
- Pounded sugarPounded sugar is caster or superfine sugar. Granulated will still be gritty by the time you serve; icing sugar works but its cornstarch dulls the flavour. Start at about 1/3 cup and taste the wine mixture before combining.
- AlmondsSweet almonds means ordinary almonds. Blanch by covering with boiling water for a minute, slipping off the skins, then chopping fine — coarse pieces sink straight through the froth to the bottom of the glass.
- Infuse the rind, then remove itThe pared lemon rind sits in the sherry to perfume it and is discarded before pouring into glasses, as the recipe says. Pare it thinly with no white pith, and give it at least 15 minutes in the wine.
- Raisin wineRaisin wine, a homemade sweet fruit wine, has effectively vanished. A cream or oloroso sherry, Madeira, or a sweet orange wine gives a similar effect; the recipe itself offers the substitution (with the almonds left out) as a way of making the dish less rich.
- Timing and serving"Altogether hour" is a printing loss with the fraction dropped, most likely a quarter or half an hour; either is about right including blanching the almonds. Fill 12 small glasses, refrigerate, and serve within a few hours before the foam separates into a clear liquid layer beneath.
Under the tidy Victorian label "lemon cream" sits the much older English syllabub, a drink-cum-dessert in which sweetened wine or cider is frothed with cream and left to separate into a foam over a boozy liquid; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century versions are often said to have been made by milking a cow directly into the bowl of wine, though how usual that really was is unclear, and later ones were made by beating or by pouring from a height. The two-jug method here is the genteel nineteenth-century descendant of that trick, and it explains why the recipe insists on speed rather than a whisk. Beeton's household books carry many such cold "creams", which demanded no oven, no ice and no gelatine; the price note of 2s. 6d. for twelve glasses suggests a modest cost for a dinner-party dish, and the suggested swap of raisin or orange wine for sherry is offered in the recipe as a way of making the dish less rich, which would also have suited households that made their own fruit wines.