No. 3459

Virgin Cream with Orange Flower Water and Noyau, Etc

Creme Vierge a la Fleur d'Orange au Noyau, etc.

Virgin creams are composed of cream, sugar and egg whites; they are cooked the same as the egg-yolk creams and are always to be left white, either finished with orange flower water, noyau, maraschino, almond milk, lemon or hazel-nuts.

Orange Flower and Noyau.—Put twelve egg-whites in a tinned basin, add one pound of sugar, and mix thoroughly with a quart of fresh cream. Cook this preparation while stirring, being careful it does not come to a boil, then remove and beat it occasionally until cold; strain through a very fine sieve, adding half a gill of noyau liquor and a gill of orange flower water, also another gill of noyau after the ice has congealed. A quarter of its quantity of Italian meringue may be incorporated into this cream when frozen. With Maraschino.—Substitute two gills of maraschino for the orange flower water. With Almond Milk.—Six ounces of almonds, including a few bitter ones, pounded with two gills and a half of cream; stir this in when the cream is cooked and partly cold. With Lemon.—Infuse the peels of two lemons after the cream is cooked. With Hazelnuts.—Half a pound of roasted, peeled and crushed hazel-nuts mingled with sugar and added to the cream before cooking.

← No. 3458 Vanilla Ice Creams—Italian Meringue Ices & Ice Creams No. 3460 White Coffee Ice Cream →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a set of five variations on a white custard base from Ranhofer's Delmonico's book. Two of them turn on ingredients that are no longer sold, or no longer safe, in the form the recipe assumes.

Bitter almondsThe almond milk variation calls for "a few bitter ones" among six ounces of almonds. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them with cream does. Unprocessed bitter almonds are barred from retail sale in the United States for this reason, and the recipe gives no quantity, no source and no treatment.
NoyauNoyau is a liqueur flavoured with the kernels of stone fruit — apricot, peach or cherry pits — and in the nineteenth century it could carry the same sort of cyanogenic compounds as bitter almonds, in amounts nobody measured. A gill and a half goes into this cream, a full gill of it after the ice has congealed, so that portion is never heated at all. Modern commercial products under the name are flavoured differently, but the recipe as written is asking for the old article.
The custard is never brought to temperatureThe instruction is to cook while stirring and be careful it does not boil, which in 1894 meant judging by the spoon. Twelve raw whites and a quart of cream held short of a boil may or may not pass through the range that makes an egg custard safe, and the recipe offers no thermometer reading and no holding time.
Uncooked additions after freezingThe second gill of noyau and the optional Italian meringue both go in cold, into a base that has already been chilled. Italian meringue in this book is whites cooked by hot sugar syrup, but the timing here puts anything added at that stage beyond the reach of the heating step.
If you want the flavourThe maraschino and lemon variations rest on ordinary ingredients, and the hazelnut version is simply a praline custard. Use a current ice cream recipe with a stated custard temperature rather than adapting this one.
Units, for reading the pageA gill is half a cup, so the gill of orange flower water is about eight tablespoons, the first noyau (half a gill) about four, and the second noyau another eight. A quart of cream to a pound of sugar and twelve whites tells you this was scaled for a restaurant freezer, not a household churn.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summary of some thirty years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and its ice cream chapter is organised the way a French chef's notebook would be: a base formula, then a column of variations. Crème vierge — virgin cream — appears to be named for its whiteness, being built on whites alone so that it freezes bone white rather than the pale yellow of an egg-yolk custard, which mattered a great deal when ices were moulded, layered and served as part of a composed dessert course. Orange flower water and noyau were among the standard perfumes of that white palette in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; noyau, from the French for the stone of a fruit, was distilled or infused from apricot and peach kernels and prized precisely because it tasted of bitter almond. The danger in that flavour was understood well before Ranhofer's day — poisoning cases involving kernel-flavoured cordials appear in nineteenth-century medical literature — but the taste stayed fashionable.