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Whipped Cream (Sweeten one pint of sweet)
Sweeten one pint of sweet cream, and add essence of lemon. Beat up the whites of four eggs until they are very light, adding them to the cream. Whip both together. As fast as the froth rises, skim it off, put in glasses, and continue until they are full.
CHAPTER III.
This is a froth-and-skim dessert of the pre-mechanical-whisk era, and it depends on raw egg white that never sees heat. The vocabulary is worth decoding, but the dish itself belongs to the reading rather than the making.
- Raw egg white, no cook stepThe whites are beaten into cream and spooned into glasses without ever reaching a temperature that would kill Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean-looking shell. Nothing later in the method compensates, and the dish is then held at room temperature while the froth is skimmed off in batches, which is exactly the window in which any contamination multiplies. A current recipe using pasteurised whites or a cooked base should be used instead.
- "Sweet cream"Not sweetened cream, but fresh cream as opposed to soured or ripened cream, the default distinction in a period when dairy turned quickly. The recipe sweetens it separately.
- "Essence of lemon"A nineteenth-century flavouring based on oil of lemon, generally more concentrated than modern lemon extract. The recipe gives no quantity, and in period books the amount intended is usually small.
- The skimming methodThe froth is lifted off as it rises and put straight into the glasses, the process repeated until they are full. Related period froth recipes drain the skimmed foam on a sieve first, though this one does not say so. The result is lighter and drier than modern machine-whipped cream.
Frothed-cream desserts like this one descend from the syllabubs and "snow creams" of English cookery, in which cream was whisked with wine, sugar and sometimes egg white and the foam lifted off with a skimmer to drain on a sieve, a technique documented in household books well before the nineteenth century. The whipped cream we know is a product of the wire whisk and later the rotary and electric beater; before those, froth was a substance that had to be harvested in layers, which is what this recipe describes. Essence of lemon rather than fresh juice reflects the period's use of bottled flavouring oils.