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Sweets and Cakes: Cream
No. 212. Crema rappresa (Coffee Cream) Ingredients: Coffee, cream, eggs, sugar, butter.
Bruise five ounces of freshly roasted Mocha coffee, and add it to three-quarters of a pint of boiling cream; cover the saucepan, let it simmer for twenty minutes, then pass through a bit of fine muslin.
In the meantime mix the yolks of ten eggs and two whole eggs with eight ounces of castor sugar and a glass of cream; add the coffee cream to this and pass the whole through a fine sieve into a buttered mould. Steam in a bain-marie for rather more than an hour, but do not let the water boil; then put the cream on ice for about an hour, and before serving turn it out on a dish and pour some cream flavoured with stick vanilla No. 213. Crema Montata alle Fragole (Strawberry Cream) Ingredients: Cream, castor sugar, Maraschino, strawberries or strawberry jam. Put a pint of cream on ice, and after two hours whip it up. Pass three tablespoonsful of strawberry jam through a sieve and add two tablespoonsful of Maraschino; mix this with the cream and build it up into a pyramid. Garnish with meringue biscuits and serve quickly. You may use fresh strawberries when in season, but then add castor sugar to taste.
No. 214. Croccante di Mandorle (Cream Nougat) Ingredients: Almonds, sugar, lemon juice, butter, castor sugar, pistacchios, preserved fruits.
Blanch half a pound of almonds, cut them into shreds and dry them in a slow oven until they are a light brown colour; then put a quarter pound of lump sugar into a saucepan and caramel it lightly; stir well with a wooden spoon. When the sugar is dissolved, throw the hot almonds into it and also a little lemon juice. Take the saucepan off the fire and mix the almonds with the sugar, pour it into a buttered mould and press it against the sides of the mould with a lemon, but remember that the casing of sugar must be very thin. (You may, if you like, spread out the mixture on a flat dish and line the mould with your hands, but the sugar must be kept hot.) Then take it out of the mould and decorate it with castor sugar, pistacchio nuts, and preserved fruits.
Fill this case with whipped cream and preserved fruits or fresh strawberries.
No. 215. Crema tartara alla Caramella (Caramel Cream) Ingredients: Cream, eggs, caramel sugar, vanilla or lemon flavouring.
Boil a pint of cream and give it any flavour you like.
When cold, add the yolks of eight eggs and two tablespoonsful of castor sugar, mix well and pass it through a sieve; then burn some sugar to a caramel, line a smooth mould with it and pour the cream into it. Boil in a bainmarie for an hour and serve hot or cold.
Four Italian cream desserts from an English book of 1901, so the measures are imperial: a pint is 20 fl oz (2.5 US cups), three-quarters of a pint is 15 fl oz (about 1.9 US cups). Two of the four are baked custards and stand or fall on temperature control.
- Never let the bain-marie boilNo. 212 says it plainly and No. 215 should say the same despite its wording ("Boil in a bain-marie"). Custard sets at 175-180F; water at a rolling boil drives the mix past that and curdles it. Hold the water bath at a bare shiver, around 170-180F, or bake the moulds in a water bath in a 300-325F oven and pull them when the centre still trembles.
- Ten yolks plus two whole eggsThat is not a misprint. The coffee cream is a very rich custard in the crème renversée family, and the high yolk count is what lets it unmould cleanly after chilling. Reducing the eggs will give you a cream that slumps on the dish.
- Coffee infusionFive ounces of bruised beans to 15 fl oz cream is a strong infusion, and "bruise" here appears to mean cracked coarsely rather than ground fine — fine grounds cloud the cream and pass silt through the muslin. "Mocha" was a trade name for beans shipped from the Yemeni port, by then applied loosely to Yemeni and Ethiopian coffee; any light-to-medium roast will do, and stale beans give the infusion a flat, cardboard note that sugar will not hide.
- Castor sugarCaster sugar, finer than granulated, coarser than confectioners'. Granulated works in the custards; for whipping into cream in No. 213 use caster or superfine so it dissolves before the cream stiffens.
- Slow oven for the almondsAbout 300F. Shredded blanched almonds want 15-25 minutes at that heat, stirred once or twice — they should be pale gold, since the caramel will darken them further.
- Lining the croccante mouldThe lemon serves as a heatproof tool, pushing the hot nut caramel thin against the mould without sticking as a spoon would. Work fast and butter the mould well; as the recipe says, the sugar must be kept hot or it stiffens and cracks instead of spreading. Oiled hands are the modern equivalent, but the mixture is genuinely hot enough to burn.
- Whipped cream and modern dairyUK double cream (48% fat) whips much stiffer than US heavy cream (36-40%). For the strawberry pyramid in No. 213 to hold its shape, whip heavy cream to firm peaks before folding in the sieved jam and Maraschino, and keep the bowl cold; two tablespoons of liqueur will loosen an under-whipped cream into soup.
- MaraschinoThe original means Luxardo-style maraschino, a dry cherry-stone liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of bright red cherries. The two taste nothing alike.
- YieldNo servings are given; a pint of cream with eight to twelve yolks would plausibly stretch to six or so. The coffee custard is chilled on ice for about an hour before unmoulding, as the recipe directs, and No. 215 is arguably better cold than hot, though the original allows either.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) by Mrs W. G. Waters framed its Italian recipes — over two hundred of them — inside a Boccaccio-style tale of diners talking their way through ten days of dinners, and it was among the period's attempts to put Italian cooking before English readers as something other than macaroni. These four sit in a run of moulded creams that belong as much to the French repertoire as the Italian — crema rappresa means simply "set cream", and the technique of a yolk-rich custard steamed in a bain-marie and turned out cold is the same one behind crème renversée and the caramel-lined puddings that Italy still calls crema caramella. The croccante is the Italian relation of French nougatine and of the almond brittle sold at fairs across the peninsula; building it into a case to be filled with whipped cream was a familiar confectioner's trick of the period, showy on a table and eaten by breaking the case. Coffee described as "Mocha" points to beans shipped through the Yemeni port of al-Mukha, a name that by 1900 had loosened into a general term for well-regarded coffee rather than any single origin.