Source: The New Home Encyclopaedia, Edited by John Wheeler (1932)
My father bought me this book for Christmas last year and it is amazing. Want to know how to make a lily pond? Check. What about entertaining unexpected visitors? It’s got you. The rules of whist? How to keep geese? How to be presented at court? Yup, those too. It’s also got a large section on cookery, from which this derives.
So, what makes this Norwegian? I’m honestly not sure, I’ve spent a long time trying to work it out without any success. I did find a couple of similar modern recipes which combined jam, custard and cream, which were also designated ‘Norwegian’, but I haven’t been able to source any original Norwegian recipe that may have inspired them. I am very open to suggestions on this, so please let me know if you have any insight.
Recipe:
Separate the yolks and whites of two eggs. Beat the yolks with one ounce of caster sugar for five minutes, put one ounce of caster sugar to the whites, and beat the same, then mix both together. Dissolve half an ounce of gelatine in a cup of water, and add a few drops of lemon juice, then add to the eggs and mix well. Pour this into a glass dish, and when set spread over any kind of jam, and cover with whipped cream.
I whipped up my eggs as instructed to get stiff peaks with the whites, and a slightly gooey pale orange mixture with the yolks. The gelatine I have needs to be heated gently, so I let 2 gelatine sheets soak in some cold water, then squeezed them out and heated them up in 1/4pint of water with some lemon juice. Because I didn’t really want to eat a large volume of uncooked egg, I stirred in the yolk mixture and heated that too. When the gelatine was all dissolved in the yolky, watery, lemony mixture (mmmm, delicious), I folded in the whites to cook them too. This gave me a warm, very airy custard-looking concoction, which I stuck in a glass jar in the fridge (I didn’t have anything much 1930s-looking and let’s be honest, I’m a mason jar wanker at heart).
This is where the problems started. As the mixture cooled, it separated into a dense custard at the bottom and a large layer of essentially air bubbles. I remedied this by stirring it before it had completely set and this stopped the layered effect, but meant a lot of the air was lost from the mixture, reducing it in volume.
Later that day, I added some blackberry, apple and sloe jam, because that is what I had (I warmed it in a hot water bath to get it to spread) and some whipped cream. The result had a lot going on. The lemon custard at the bottom was very pleasant, although it could have been more lemony, but this was at odds with the flavour and texture of the jam, which made everything too sickly sweet.
Suggested alterations: Get rid of the jam and up the lemon juice to give yourself a creamy lemon posset experience?
Final verdict: A bit weird, but not Apple Fool or Jellied Surprise Salad weird.
Cabbages and Kings. And Kate 
my family makes this every year at Christmas and we’ve never figured out the origin or heard of it anywhere else, it must be from this book! We always do a thin layer of apricot jam between the lemon base and the cream top, and decorate with glace cherries – it is a very odd dessert but it wouldn’t be Christmas without it 🙂
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I’m so excited. We used to have norweign cream as a child and it was amazing. But I never got the recipe from my mum before she died. I have been searching on and off for years but this is the first time I have found it!
I think the issue you had was in cooking it. It is made with raw eggs (and we ate it a lot with no issues). By cooking it you turned it into custard, it’s a light and airy almost mouse like texture. And it really is delicious!
the only difference I can see is mum added lemon zest as well as lemon juice.
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