Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Cream Flavored with Cinnamon
Cream Flavored with Cinnamon
Put one breakfast cupful of cream into a saucepan with two ounces of caster-sugar and add half and ounce of cinnamon broken in pieces; place the pan on the fire and boil for fifteen minutes. Meanwhile beat up the whites of four eggs to a stiff froth and while the cream is boiling pour them in; boil gently for a minute or two longer, strain it onto a dish, sprinkle a little sugar over and add a little orange-flower water; bake it about two minutes to give a light-brown color, and serve.
A very old-fashioned cinnamon cream, closer to a browned egg-white custard than to a modern pudding. The wording is loose in a few places, so read it through before lighting the burner.
- The hinge: the egg whitesBeaten whites poured into boiling cream will set on contact and give a curdy, soft-meringue mass rather than a smooth custard. That is what the recipe intends, and the straining step afterward is there to catch the cinnamon and any coarse curd. If you want a smooth cream, this is not the method.
- A breakfast cupfulA large old cup measure, roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces. The recipe says only 'cream'; one cup of heavy cream is a sensible reading.
- Caster-sugarSuperfine sugar. Two ounces is about a quarter cup; ordinary granulated works, and dissolves easily in hot cream.
- Half an ounce of cinnamonThat is 14 g of stick cinnamon, four or five whole quills, which is an aggressive amount by current taste. It infuses rather than dissolves, and is strained out, but consider halving it.
- Boil for fifteen minutesA cup of cream at a real boil for a quarter hour will reduce by a third or more and scorches readily. Keep it at a bare simmer, stir, and use a heavy pan.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, usually as orange blossom water in Middle Eastern groceries. Strength varies a good deal between brands, so add cautiously: a quarter teaspoon is plenty for this quantity.
- Bake it about two minutesTwo minutes will not brown anything in a domestic oven; the direction only makes sense with intense heat close to the surface, such as a salamander. The equivalent is a broiler set high with the dish close to the element, or a kitchen torch, watched constantly.
- YieldPerhaps a pint or a little less of finished cream, serving two generously or four in small cups. Best eaten warm, soon after browning, before the meringue weeps.
Cinnamon and orange-flower water together belong to an older tradition than the 1896 book that prints it: spiced boiled creams browned on top run through English and French cookery from the seventeenth century onward, the same family as burnt cream and crème brûlée. Orange-flower water was one of the standard sweet flavorings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sold by druggists alongside rose water, and it faded from American kitchens as vanilla extract became cheap and reliable. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 compilation gathers hundreds of such recipes.