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Wine Cream
Arrange lady fingers or slices of sponge cake in a dish, pour over cream made as follows: Mix one-third cup sugar, grated rind and juice one-half lemon, one-fourth cup Sherry wine, and yolks of two eggs; place over fire and stir vigorously with wire whisk until it thickens and is frothy, then pour over beaten whites of two eggs and continue beating.
A sherry sabayon poured warm over sponge cake — essentially trifle without the custard powder. The whole thing hinges on cooking the yolk mixture gently enough that it foams instead of scrambling.
- Use a double boiler"place over fire" meant a saucepan set directly over the range, where the cook could pull it off the heat instantly. Set a metal bowl over barely simmering water instead, and whisk constantly; the mixture should reach about 160F, thick enough to leave ribbons, without any hint of curd.
- QuantitiesOne-third cup sugar, the rind and juice of half a lemon, one-quarter cup sherry, two eggs. That is a small dessert — enough for four modest servings over lady fingers, six if the cake dish is generous.
- The sherryA medium-dry sherry (amontillado) or a cream sherry both work; American sherries of the period were generally sweeter and heavier than a fino, so lean that way. Avoid so-called cooking sherry, which is salted.
- Raw whitesThe beaten whites are never cooked — the hot yolk mixture is not enough volume or heat to pasteurize them. Use pasteurized egg whites, or whites from eggs you trust, and keep the finished dish cold and eat it the same day.
- Lady fingersPeriod lady fingers were dry, crisp piped sponge, closer to Italian savoiardi than the soft supermarket kind. The dry sort absorb the sauce properly instead of collapsing.
- Serving temperatureThe recipe does not say whether to chill. Assembled and left an hour or two the cake drinks up the sauce; served straight from the pan it is a hot sabayon, which is also perfectly good but a different dish.
- It will loosenA yolk-and-wine foam lightened with whites has no starch or gelatine to hold it. Expect some weeping after a few hours in the refrigerator; assemble close to the time you mean to serve.
This is the Anglo-American descendant of Italian zabaglione and French sabayon — sugar, egg yolk and fortified wine whisked over heat until it swells to several times its volume — often with the whites folded in and the whole poured over sponge cake, which turns it into a kind of quick trifle. Fannie Farmer's book is generally dated to 1896, written for a school teaching household economy, and sherry sauces of this type were one way to dress up bought cake: no ice, no long baking, and only two eggs. Sherry and Madeira held a peculiar place in nineteenth-century American cooking, tolerated in the kitchens of households that would not have served wine at table, on the reasoning that cooking drove off the alcohol — here it largely does not, since the wine goes in at the start of a gentle custard rather than a boil.