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Italian Cream
Soak one-third box gelatine half an hour in cold milk, put a quart milk on to boil, and when boiling stir in yolks of eight eggs well beaten, add one cup and a half of sugar and the gelatine; when the custard begins to thicken, take it off and pour into a deep dish in which the eight whites have been beaten to a stiff froth; mix well together and flavor to taste; put in molds, and allow four hours to cool. This cream is much more easily made in winter than in summer.-Mrs. N. P. Wiles, L
The interesting part of this recipe is also the part that stops it: eight egg whites go into the dish raw and are never cooked. Read the points below before deciding what to do with it.
- The whites are never cookedThe yolk custard reaches perhaps 175F, but it is then poured over eight stiffly beaten raw whites — a large, cold, air-filled mass that drops the temperature of the mixture immediately. Nothing in the finished cream is held anywhere near a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the gelatine then sets it for four hours in the cooling stage where bacteria are happiest. A current recipe using pasteurized egg whites should be used instead.
- Scale makes it worse, not betterThis is a quart of milk and sixteen egg components in a single deep mould. A large volume of dairy-and-egg gel cools slowly through the middle, and the original allows only four hours in a period when "to cool" often meant a cellar or a larder rather than refrigeration.
- Why the author mentions the seasons"Much more easily made in winter than in summer" most likely refers to setting rather than safety: unrefrigerated gelatine desserts were unreliable in warm weather. The same warm weather is exactly what made a raw-white cream dangerous, which the note does not address.
- The gelatine is not comparable to modern product"One-third box" refers to a boxed sheet or shred gelatine of unstandardised strength, well before granulated gelatine was sold by measured Bloom rating. There is no honest conversion to a number of modern envelopes here.
- Missing flavouring"Flavor to taste" leaves the choice of flavouring to the cook and gives no quantity. Vanilla, lemon, and sherry or brandy were common flavourings for moulded creams of this kind.
"Italian cream" in nineteenth-century American cookbooks rarely has much to do with Italy; it was a general name for a rich moulded cream, usually one lightened with beaten whites or whipped cream and set with isinglass or gelatine. Names like Italian, Spanish, Bavarian and Russian cream were attached loosely to moulded desserts through the 1800s, and cooks moved recipes between them freely. Its appearance in The Dixie Cook Book — credited here, as many entries there are, to a named contributor — comes at a time when commercially boxed gelatine was widely available, sparing a household the long labour of clarifying calves' foot jelly or isinglass. The closing remark about winter is a reminder that the whole category depended on cold storage: an ice house, a cellar, or a cold January pantry.