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Pink Cream
Mix with half a pound of fine powdered sugar three gills of strawberry or currant juice, half pint of fresh cream; whisk until thoroughly mixed; serve in a glass dish.
A three-ingredient uncooked cream, closer to a drinkable fool than a set dessert. The whole thing turns on keeping the acid and the dairy from fighting each other.
- Acid and creamStrawberry and especially currant juice are acidic enough to curdle cream if the two meet warm or too fast. Have both thoroughly chilled, and whisk the juice into the cream in a slow stream rather than tipping it in at once.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so three gills is 1½ cups of juice to half a pint (1 cup) of cream. That is more juice than dairy, which is why the result stays pourable.
- "Fine powdered sugar"In 1900 this generally meant granulated sugar ground fine, closer to today's caster sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. Either dissolves here; caster sugar gives a cleaner flavour.
- Half a pound of sugarThat is roughly 1 cup by weight of caster sugar, or near 2 cups of modern powdered sugar. It is a great deal for 2½ cups of liquid; with sweet strawberry juice, start with half and taste, since currant juice is the one that genuinely needs it.
- The juiceCrush ripe berries or currants and press through a fine sieve or jelly bag rather than using bottled juice, which is usually cooked and thin. Strain out every seed; the texture is the point of the dish.
- Don't expect whipped creamWith that much liquid the mixture will not hold peaks. Whisk only until smooth and evenly coloured, then chill an hour before serving so it thickens slightly.
- Cream to buyUse pasteurized heavy or whipping cream. Avoid ultra-pasteurized if you have a choice, as it takes acid less gracefully and tastes cooked.
- YieldRoughly 2½ to 3 cups once the sugar is dissolved, enough for four small glasses. Serve in stemmed glasses with sponge fingers or thin shortbread.
Pink Cream belongs to a long family of English fruit-and-cream dishes, fools and creams and syllabubs, in which raw cream is slackened with fruit juice or wine and sugar and served cold in glass. Such desserts were judged as much by appearance as by difficulty: a glass dish of pale pink cream was table decoration as much as food. Currants, now a market rarity in much of North America, were then a standard garden fruit and prized precisely for the sharpness that keeps a sugared cream from cloying. The recipe also quietly assumes a household with reliable access to fresh, unsoured cream, and it is written to be made and eaten the same day.