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Imperial Cream
1030. Take the juice of three large oranges or two lemons, sweeten it well with double-refined sugar pounded and sifted, put it into the dish you design to serve it up in, then take a pint of thick cream, sweeten it a little, boil it and stir it till it is milk warm; put it in a teapot with one spoonful of orange-flower water, and pour it very high on the juice, which will make it curdle, and look like a honeycomb.
A cold-set curd made without gelatine or rennet: hot sweetened cream poured from a height onto citrus juice, which sets it into soft flakes. Everything depends on the temperature of the cream and the height of the pour.
- The hinge: pour hot, pour highThe hinge: pour high -- the fall from the teapot spout disperses and aerates the cream as it meets the juice, so the curd sets in an open, honeycombed mass rather than a dense lump. The recipe says only to pour 'very high'; pour in a steady thin stream from well above the dish and do not stir afterwards.
- "Milk warm" is misleading here"Milk warm" means lukewarm, roughly blood heat -- the cream is boiled first and then stirred as it cools to that point, which is what the recipe directs.
- A pintThis is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz, or 2 1/2 US cups. Use heavy or whipping cream at 36 per cent fat or above; single cream and half-and-half will thin out instead of setting.
- Double-refined sugarThe whitest, purest loaf sugar of the day, bought in a cone and broken down at home. Ordinary caster sugar is the direct equivalent, and needs no pounding or sifting.
- Orange-flower waterA distillate of bitter orange blossom, sold in Middle Eastern groceries and some supermarkets. Strengths vary a good deal between brands; start with half a teaspoon rather than a full spoonful and taste, since it turns soapy very quickly.
- Juice quantityThree large oranges give roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of juice, two lemons about 1/4 cup. Lemons make a sharper, firmer curd; oranges a softer one, and with oranges you may want a squeeze of lemon to guarantee the set.
- Choose the dish firstThe cream is poured into its serving vessel and never moved, so use a wide, shallow glass or china bowl that shows the honeycomb from the side. Do not tip, stir or spoon it about before serving.
- Yield and servingA pint of cream will serve about six as a light dessert. The recipe gives no chilling time; two to three hours in the cold suits it, and it will hold overnight covered, though the curd firms and some clear whey may gather at the edges.
Imperial cream belongs to a large family of English curded creams, whipped syllabubs and "everlastings" that ran from the late seventeenth century well into the nineteenth, all of them exploiting the same trick: acid, usually citrus or wine, thickening dairy without heat-set eggs or any setting agent. The high pour from a teapot may well have been done at the table for effect, though the recipe claims only that it produces the honeycombed curd it names. The orange-flower water fits the eighteenth-century taste for floral distillates, which by the Victorian period were giving ground to vanilla.