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Roman Cream
Put five ounces of sugar into a saucepan with one pint of milk, a small piece of cinnamon, and one ounce of gelatine, and place it on the side of the fire; allow the gelatine to dissolve, and then whisk it well. Beat the yolks of six eggs up till they are light, as for custard, and put them into the saucepan, though do not let the mixture boil. Strain through a fine sieve into a freezer, and when nearly cold whip to a froth, and add one teacupful of curacoa or one wineglassful of wine. Turn the cream out into glasses, and keep them on the ice until they are wanted.
A gelatine-set custard in the bavarois family, lightened by whipping as it cools and flavoured with liqueur. Two things in the text will mislead a modern cook: the strength of the gelatine and the word "freezer."
- Gelatine strengthOne ounce of gelatine to a pint of milk is a great deal by current standards; nineteenth-century sheet and granulated gelatines were generally weaker and less standardised than today's product. Modern powdered gelatine runs about 1/4 oz per envelope, and roughly one envelope per pint gives a soft, spoonable cream rather than a rubbery one.
- "Freezer" does not mean the freezerIn 1896 a freezer was the metal canister of an ice-cream churn, set in a pail of ice and salt. Straining the custard into it is simply a way of cooling it fast. A metal bowl set over ice does the same work; the mixture is never meant to freeze.
- "The side of the fire"Low, indirect heat on a coal range. Use the lowest burner setting or a bowl over barely simmering water, and take the custard off at 175-180F, when it coats the back of a spoon. It must not boil or the yolks will curdle and the sieve will do the rest of the work for you.
- Whisking at the right momentThe hinge of the recipe is "when nearly cold whip to a froth." Whip too early and the mixture is too fluid to hold air; whip after it has set and you break the gel. Watch for the point where it thickens to unwhipped cream and beat hard from there.
- Old measuresA teacupful is usually reckoned at about 4 fl oz (1/2 cup), and a wineglassful about 2 fl oz. Note the disparity: the recipe offers a considerably larger measure of curacao than of wine.
- CuracoaCuraçao, the bitter-orange liqueur; Grand Marnier or Cointreau stand in directly. The cinnamon is a whole small piece, infused and removed by the straining, not ground.
- SugarFive ounces is about 3/4 cup, which with a liqueur addition makes a distinctly sweet cream.
- YieldSix to eight small glasses. Serve them very cold; the gelatine softens quickly at room temperature and the whipped texture goes with it.
Oscar Tschirky, ma"tre d'h tel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to this 1896 collection though he was famously not a cook himself; the book records the hotel's working repertoire, much of it French in method and Victorian-Anglo in vocabulary. Roman Cream belongs to the large family of moulded and glassed gelatine creams -- bavarois, Spanish cream, Russian cream, charlotte russe -- that dominated late nineteenth-century dessert lists once commercial gelatine made setting a custard a matter of ounces rather than of boiling calves' feet. The instruction to keep the glasses on ice is worth noticing: a grand hotel had ice in quantity and a cold larder to hold it, and dishes like this one were partly a display of that capacity.