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Jenny Lind
4 small sponge cakes 4 tablespoonfuls raspberry jam I lemon 6 tablespoonfuls sugar 1½ gills (3/4 cup) water I 3 eggs 4 tablespoonfuls chopped cocoanut 3/4 pint (1½ cups) whipping cream 8 preserved cherries Slice the sponge cakes and place them in a glass dish; spread the raspberry jam over them. Put the grated rind and strained juice of the lemon into an enameled saucepan, add four tablespoonfuls of the sugar and the water; bring to boiling point; beat up the yolks of the eggs in a basin; pour the boiling mixture over them, stirring all the time; return to the saucepan, and stir over the fire until the mixture thickens-it must not boil. Beat up the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth and stir them gently into the custard.
Take from the fire, and, when it becomes cool, pour it over the sponge cakes. Sprinkle in the cocoanut, then cover with the whipped cream to which the remainder of the sugar has been added, and decorate with the preserved cherries.
Jenny Lind received its name from the sweet singer of the same name. She was very fond of this dainty and delicious cake-custard pudding.
A late-Victorian trifle in all but name: sponge, jam, lemon custard, coconut and cream layered in a glass dish. Most of the work is in the custard, and that is where the recipe needs the most attention.
- The hinge: the custard must not boilStir the lemon custard over gentle heat only until it coats a spoon, around 170-175F. Because it is heavily acidulated with lemon juice, it curdles more readily than a plain custard; a bowl set over barely simmering water is safer than direct heat.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup, so 1½ gills is the ¾ cup the book helpfully supplies. The ¾ pint of cream is 1½ cups by American measure; if working from an English edition of the period, an Imperial ¾ pint is closer to 1¾ cups.
- Why enameledThe instruction to use an enameled saucepan is not fussiness. Lemon juice and rind in bare cast iron, aluminum or unlined copper will pick up a metallic taste and grey the custard. Any non-reactive pan works.
- The egg whitesThe whites go into the custard while it is still over the fire, and only then does it come off, so they get some heat but never a full cook. If you are serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg, use pasteurized eggs or leave the whites out and lighten the custard with a little extra whipped cream instead.
- CocoanutUnsweetened desiccated or freshly grated coconut, not the sweetened flaked kind sold for cookies, which will make the whole dish cloying alongside the jam and sugared cream.
- Sponge cakes"Four small sponge cakes" probably means individual sponges of the sort sold as sponge fingers or small dariole-moulded cakes, though the recipe does not say. A few ounces of plain sponge, sliced, will stand in; a slab of pound cake is too dense to take up the custard.
- Preserved cherriesPeriod preserved cherries were candied or brandied fruit. Amarena or brandied cherries suit it; modern bright-red maraschinos are the closest supermarket match but far sweeter.
- Chilling and yieldPour the custard over the sponge only when it is properly cool, or it will melt the cream layer. Chill for a few hours so the sponge softens through. Four small sponge cakes and 1½ cups of cream will serve about four to six.
Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano billed as "the Swedish Nightingale," was the most famous singer in the English-speaking world after P. T. Barnum brought her to America in 1850, and her name was attached to an extraordinary number of things: melons, a locomotive type, chairs, soups, cakes and puddings. The claim here that she was personally fond of this particular dish is the kind of assertion nineteenth-century cookbooks made freely and rarely documented; treat it as tradition rather than fact. The dish itself is a trifle in the English manner, and its appearance in a collection like this one shows how thoroughly the celebrity name had become a selling point in its own right, long after Lind's retirement from the stage. What actually dates it is the coconut, which by the closing decades of the century was cheap, shredded and dried, and turned up sprinkled over nearly everything sweet.