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Cream Flavored with Lemon
Put the thinly-pared rind of a small lemon and one pint of milk into a saucepan, place it over a slow fire and boil for five minutes. Put five tablespoonfuls of caster-sugar into a basin with the yolks of four eggs and beat them well, then stir in gradually the boiling milk, taking out the lemon peel. Pour the cream into small cups, stand them in a stewpan with boiling water to half their height and let them simmer gently at the side of the fire for fifteen minutes. If the hot water comes above half of the cups it is apt to enter them and spoil the cream. Leave the cream until cold, then turn it out of the cups onto a dish, and serve.
This is a lemon-infused pot de crème set in a water bath — four yolks to a pint of milk, no cream in it despite the name. The whole thing hinges on keeping the water bath below a simmer.
- Never let the bath boil"Simmer gently at the side of the fire" means water at roughly 180–190F, not a rolling boil. Custard sets at 170–175F; hotter than that and the yolks curdle and weep. On a modern stovetop, hold the water at a bare quiver, or set the cups in a roasting pan of hot water in a 325F oven for 30–35 minutes.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar, sold as caster sugar in Britain and as superfine or baker's sugar in the US. Ordinary granulated works — it dissolves fine once the hot milk goes in. Five tablespoons is about 2 1/4 oz / 65 g.
- PintAn American pint is 16 fl oz / 475 ml; an imperial pint is 20 fl oz and would give a looser custard. The book was compiled in New York, but the wording here (caster sugar, stewpan, 'at the side of the fire') is British, so which pint was meant is not certain.
- Tempering the yolksAdd the hot milk to the beaten yolks in a thin stream while whisking, not all at once. The instruction "stir in gradually" is doing real work here.
- Pared rind, not zestTake the yellow peel off in wide strips with a vegetable peeler and leave the white pith behind — pith turns the custard bitter. Steeping five minutes in scalded milk gives a mild flavor; ten off the heat gives more.
- Strain before fillingNot in the original, but pour the mixture through a fine sieve into the cups. It catches any bit of set egg and any stray peel, and the finished custard turns out cleaner.
- Water levelThe warning about water entering the cups is sound. Half their height is right, and a folded towel in the bottom of the pan keeps the cups from rattling and tipping.
- UnmouldingThese only turn out cleanly if fully cold — chill several hours or overnight. Run a thin knife around the edge and invert. Ramekins or straight-sided custard cups release better than teacups.
- YieldSix small custards, or four larger ones.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection ran to over nine hundred pages and swept up the whole late-nineteenth-century restaurant repertoire. A custard of milk, yolks and sugar cooked in a bain-marie is one of the oldest set pieces in European cookery, and lemon peel was a common perfumer of it before vanilla extract became cheap and universal in American kitchens. The name here reflects older usage, in which "a cream" could mean a smooth set or thickened sweet dish rather than the dairy product -- hence a recipe called cream that contains none. The detail about keeping the water below half the height of the cups, and the reference to setting them "at the side of the fire," place the instructions in the coal-range era, when a cook controlled temperature by moving a pan rather than turning a dial.