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Neapolitan Cream
Stir together in a basin one tablespoonful each of flour and custard powder with one teacupful of milk; when smooth turn it into a saucepan with one pint of fresh fruit juice, stir the whole over the fire with a wooden spoon, and boil until thickened, sweetening to the taste with caster-sugar. Move the cream to the side of the fire and stir in quickly the beaten yolks of two eggs; whisk the whites of two eggs and stir them lightly in. Pour the cream into a china bowl, and serve.
A fruit-juice custard thickened with starch rather than eggs alone, finished with beaten egg and served soft in a bowl. Two things decide whether it works: the acidity of the juice and the heat when the eggs go in.
- Custard powderThis means a proprietary cornstarch blend coloured with annatto and flavoured with vanilla, of the Bird's type, still sold in British groceries. A tablespoon of cornstarch with a pinch of salt and a few drops of vanilla stands in for it.
- A teacupfulGenuinely imprecise in this period; teacups of the day held roughly 4 to 6 fluid ounces. Treat it as about 3/4 cup of milk and adjust, since the flour and powder are the fixed quantities.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar, which dissolves fast in a hot liquid without granular grit. Granulated works if you add it early enough to melt; confectioners' sugar does not, because of the cornstarch in it.
- Fruit juice and starchA pint of acidic juice will thin a flour-and-cornstarch bond if held at a hard boil, and very tart juices weaken it badly. Bring it just to the boil, hold it a minute until it coats the spoon, then stop.
- Side of the fireOn a coal range this meant a cooler zone away from the firebox, not the heat turned off. On a modern burner, pull the pan off entirely before the yolks go in and let it settle for a moment.
- Do not reboil after the eggsThis is the hinge. Once the yolks are stirred in the mixture must never return to the boil, or the egg proteins will set into visible curds in what should be a smooth pouring cream.
- The raw whitesWhisked whites folded lightly into a cream already off the heat are unlikely to reach a temperature that pasteurises them. Use pasteurised eggs, or leave the whites out and serve the cream as a plain fruit custard, if raw egg is a concern for who is eating it.
- Yield and servingAbout four servings. The recipe gives no serving temperature; as written it goes straight from the pan to the china bowl and to table, so warm. It will thicken considerably as it cools and can be chilled instead, though the whipped whites lose their lift.
"Neapolitan" in late nineteenth-century British and American kitchens rarely meant anything specifically from Naples; it had become a byword for confections built in coloured layers or bands, as in Neapolitan ice cream, and by extension for sweets tinted with fruit. Here the name is doing work chiefly as a menu flourish for what is otherwise a fruit-juice custard. The giveaway is the custard powder: a starch-based stand-in for eggs of the Bird's type, generally traced to English commerce of the late 1830s onward, whose whole purpose was to make a reliable custard without a large number of eggs. Its use here alongside real yolks and whites is characteristic of the period's pragmatism -- the powder for insurance on the thickening, the eggs for richness and lightness at the end.