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Hamburg Cream
Stir together the rind and juice of two large lemons, and onecиp sugar, add the well-beaten yolks of eight eggs; put all in a tin pail, set in a pot of boiling water, stir for three minutes, take from the fire, add the well-beaten whites of the eggs, and serve, when cold, in custard-glasses. - Mrs. C. Fullington.
A lemon-and-egg foam of the sort that filled custard glasses at Victorian suppers. The method cannot be reproduced safely, and the notes below explain where it fails as well as what the older language means.
- The raw whites are the problemThe whites of eight eggs are beaten and folded in after the pan leaves the heat, then the cream is chilled and served. They never reach any temperature at all, and salmonella in raw shell eggs remains a live risk, particularly in a dish held cold and eaten by children or older guests.
- Three minutes is not a cooked custardEven the yolk mixture is marginal. Stirred over boiling water for three minutes, a mass of eight yolks plus a cup of sugar and lemon juice may thicken by acid and heat without ever holding the temperature needed to make eggs safe. Nothing in the recipe asks the cook to check.
- Nothing here is a fixable timingThis is not a case of adding a few minutes. A proper lemon cream today is built on a cooked egg base held to temperature, or on pasteurised eggs; use a current recipe rather than adjusting this one.
- "One cup sugar"The original text carries a typesetting slip — onec i p — for "one cup." A period cup is close enough to the modern 8 fl oz measure for reading purposes.
- A tin pail in a pot of boiling waterAn improvised double boiler. The tin pail was an ordinary lightweight kitchen bucket, set down into a larger pot so the eggs cooked by the heat of the surrounding water rather than over direct flame.
- Rind and juice"Rind" here means the zest, pared or grated from the outside of the fruit; the white pith was avoided as bitter. Two large lemons give somewhere between a third and a half cup of juice.
- Custard-glassesSmall stemmed or handled glasses, served on a plate with a spoon. The recipe gives no yield.
Hamburg cream appears in American and British household books through the second half of the nineteenth century, generally as a lemon sponge or foam built on egg yolks and served cold in glasses; the name is usually explained as a nod to German dessert creams, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. Credited here to a contributing housewife, it reflects how such community cookbooks were assembled, with neighbours sending in the dishes they made under their own names. Uncooked whites folded into a base off the heat were common in nineteenth-century desserts — charlottes, snows, whips and floating islands alike; the practice fell away in the late twentieth century as egg-borne salmonella came to be recognised as a risk.