Stone cream is one of those dishes that has quietly dropped out of the national repertoire without anyone quite noticing it had gone. It is a lightly set cream, flavoured with lemon and a splash of sherry, poured warm over a spoonful of jam and left to firm up in the fridge until it holds its shape when you turn a spoon through it. The dessert is old enough to be mentioned in seventeenth-century accounts of English cold sweets, and it was still being cooked on television as late as the 1970s and 80s, on Yorkshire Television’s long-running Farmhouse Kitchen. This is the classic English version, gently updated for a modern kitchen.
Stone Cream
Ingredients
- 6 tsp good apricot jam (or other preserve)
- 1 sachet (7g) powdered gelatine or 3 leaves
- 100 ml sweet or medium sherry
- 450 ml single cream or a mix of single and double
- 50 g caster sugar
- 1 lemon zest and juice
- toasted flaked almonds to serve, optional
Instructions
- Put a teaspoon of jam into the bottom of each of six small glasses or dishes.
- Sprinkle the gelatine over the sherry in a small bowl and leave for five minutes to soften. (If using leaf gelatine, soak the leaves in cold water for five minutes, then squeeze out and add to the warmed sherry to dissolve.)
- Warm the cream and sugar together gently in a saucepan over low heat, stirring, until the sugar has dissolved. Do not let it boil.
- Take the pan off the heat and stir in the gelatine-sherry mixture until completely dissolved, then stir in the lemon zest and juice.
- Leave the mixture to cool until it just begins to thicken – a few minutes is usually enough.
- Pour or spoon the cream carefully over the jam in each glass, taking care not to disturb it too much.
- Chill for at least four hours, or overnight, until fully set. Serve as it is, or scattered with toasted flaked almonds.
Tips and variations
The traditional recipe was set with isinglass, a fish-derived gelatine that has all but disappeared from kitchens; ordinary powdered or leaf gelatine does the job just as well and is far easier to find. Apricot jam is the classic choice at the bottom of the glass, but a good raspberry or blackcurrant jam works well too, and gives a sharper contrast against the lemon cream. If sherry is not to hand, a dry white wine or a splash of brandy will do much the same work — the alcohol is there for flavour, not for setting, so there is no need to be precious about which bottle you reach for.
It is worth resisting the urge to pour the cream in while it is still hot, or it will simply melt straight through the jam rather than sitting above it in a distinct layer. Let it cool until it just starts to thicken at the edges of the pan, then pour gently. This is also a genuinely inexpensive pudding to make — cream, a spoonful of jam and a lemon go a long way across six glasses, which is presumably no small part of why it turned up so often in thriftier decades.
If you like the idea of reviving a dessert that has fallen out of fashion, our Mrs Robin’s Fruit Cake is another old English recipe worth bringing back to the table.
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