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Holstein Cream
(Germany.) Infuse the rind of a lemon for 1/2 hour with a pint of cream, in a warm place. Then boil it, add a teaspoonful of ground rice and two tablespoonfuls of sugar. Boil, stir a little longer, pour into a dish with slices of sponge cake in it, and set on ice. Serve cold.
A thin, barely thickened lemon cream poured hot over sponge cake and chilled — closer to a soaked trifle than to a set pudding. The whole dish turns on the lemon infusion, so treat that step as the recipe rather than a preliminary.
- The hinge: pare, don't grateTake the rind off in wide strips with a peeler, avoiding the white pith, which turns the cream bitter over a long steeping. Heat the cream until steaming but not boiling, take it off the heat, cover, and let it stand 30 minutes; "a warm place" means the back of the stove, not a burner. The recipe does not say to strain, but the peel is easier to lift out before boiling than after.
- Ground riceClose to what is sold today as rice flour, though ground rice was traditionally milled a little coarser; not rice cereal or whole ground raw grain. Slake the teaspoonful in a spoonful of cold cream before it goes into the hot cream or it will clump.
- How thick it will beOne teaspoon of rice flour to a pint of cream gives a pourable sauce, not a custard that stands up. That is intentional: it is meant to soak the cake. If you want something spoonable, two to three teaspoons is the practical limit before it tastes starchy.
- A pintIf the book is American, read this as 2 cups (16 fl oz); an imperial pint would be 20. Heavy cream works; light cream or half-and-half is less likely to feel cloying.
- Boiling creamBring it just to a boil and hold it at a bare simmer two or three minutes, stirring, to cook out the starch. Hard boiling cream scorches on the bottom and can break it.
- Sponge cakeLine the dish with slices of a plain sponge or ladyfingers — anything close-crumbed enough to absorb without collapsing. Day-old is better than fresh.
- "Set on ice"Refrigerate, covered, at least three hours and preferably overnight so the cake fully softens. "On ice" meant a bowl packed in ice or set in the icebox.
- YieldServes four as written, in one shallow dish or four small glasses.
Holstein, at the base of the Jutland peninsula, was and is dairy country — cream, butter and buttermilk are the region's kitchen signature, and its name attached to a good many dishes. The dish itself belongs to a large German family of cold *Cremes*: milk or cream flavoured by infusion, lightly bound with a starch such as rice flour, cornflour or arrowroot, and poured over cake to chill. It sits alongside English trifle and French charlotte as one of the many nineteenth-century answers to the problem of yesterday's sponge cake. Books like this one, which gathered dishes from travels abroad for American households, are full of such recipes, and one might guess at the appeal: they were brief, needed no oven, and depended on nothing more than a cold place to set.