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Pistachio Cream
Put half a pound of well blanched pistachio nuts into a mortar and pound them to a paste, adding a few drops of orange-flower water to prevent their oiling. When a smooth paste is formed, place it in a lined saucepan with one quart of cream and half an ounce of gelatine, sweetening to taste with caster-sugar. Stir this over a fire until the gelatine has become dissolved, then remove. Serve cold in jelly-glasses.
A simple set cream that depends almost entirely on two things: a genuinely smooth nut paste and cream that never boils. Everything else is arithmetic.
- Do not let it boilGelatine loses setting power with prolonged high heat, and cream at a boil will catch and taste scorched. Warm the mixture only until the granules have completely disappeared, around 120-140F, then take it off.
- Blanching the nutsPour boiling water over shelled pistachios, let them stand a minute, drain, and rub the skins off in a towel. The papery skin is what turns the finished cream a muddy brown-green rather than a clean pale green.
- Mortar or machineA food processor will do the work of the mortar, but pistachios throw their oil quickly when heated by a blade. Pulse rather than run, and add the orange-flower water a few drops at a time as the original directs; it keeps the paste from breaking.
- GelatineHalf an ounce is about 14 g, roughly two 1/4-oz envelopes of modern powdered gelatine, or about five to eight sheets depending on brand. Soften it in a little cold water or cream before it goes near the heat.
- Lined saucepanIn this period a lined pan usually meant tin-lined copper, so that the cream would not sit against bare copper. Any heavy stainless or enamelled pan is the equivalent.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar, which dissolves without grittiness in a barely warmed liquid. Granulated works if you give it time in the warm cream; do not substitute confectioners' sugar, which carries cornstarch.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, and still strong. A few drops is literal: a teaspoon in a quart of cream will push the dish from faintly floral to perfumed.
- Straining and chillingPass the mixture through a fine sieve before it goes into the glasses unless you want the ground nut texture, then chill at least four hours. The recipe serves it in the glasses rather than unmoulded.
- YieldA quart of cream fills eight to ten small jelly glasses. It is very rich; small servings are correct.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his cook book in 1896, and its dessert chapters are essentially the repertoire of the late nineteenth-century French-trained hotel kitchen written down for American households. Pistachio cream belongs to the large family of gelatine-set creams that stood between blancmange and Bavarian cream on a Gilded Age menu, valued as much for colour as for flavour. Pistachios were an expensive imported nut in that period, largely from the eastern Mediterranean and Persia, which is part of why the dish read as luxurious. The orange-flower water is a survival of an older confectioner's habit, used here for a practical reason the recipe states plainly rather than for perfume alone, and jelly-glasses were standard household glassware, small and straight-sided, and served for preserves as well.