Home › Creams and Custards › Raspberry Cream
Raspberry Cream
One quart good cream, one pint fresh raspberries; mash and rub the fruit through a fine sieve or strainer, to extract the seeds, bring the cream to a boil (having reserved one pint for froth), and add it to the berries while it remains hot, sweeten with powdered sugar to taste, let it become cold. Now raise cream which has been reserved to a froth with a beater, take off the froth and lay it on a sieve to drain; fill dish or glasses with the cream and place froth on top. Very nice. Any kind of berries, jam or jelly is good, and can be used without straining.
This is a pouring cream rather than a set custard — no eggs, no gelatin, no cooking beyond a single boil. It succeeds or fails on the temperature at which the hot cream meets the acidic fruit.
- QuantitiesOne quart of cream is 4 cups, one pint of raspberries about 2 cups (roughly 10 oz). A pint of that cream is held back for the froth, so 2 cups go into the fruit mixture.
- Which cream"Good cream" here means unhomogenized heavy cream with a high fat content. Use heavy or whipping cream at 36 percent fat or above; half-and-half and light cream will neither carry the fruit nor whip.
- The hinge: curdlingRaspberries are acidic and boiled cream added to them can break into grains. Take the cream off the heat the moment it rises, and pour it into the purée in a thin stream while stirring, rather than dumping the fruit into the pan.
- Straining the seedsPush the mashed berries through a fine sieve with the back of a ladle, then scrape the underside — the pulp clinging there is most of the yield. Expect about 1 cup of purée from 2 cups of fruit.
- Powdered sugarNineteenth-century powdered sugar was simply cane sugar ground fine, with no starch. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will dull the flavor slightly; superfine (caster) sugar is closer, and dissolves readily in the hot cream. Start with about 1/2 cup and taste.
- The frothWhipping the reserved pint and draining the froth on a sieve was the old way of shedding the thin liquid that separates from lightly beaten unhomogenized cream. With modern cream, whip to soft peaks and skip the sieve; there is nothing to drain off.
- Chilling"Let it become cold" means several hours in the refrigerator, ideally overnight. Served warm or barely cool it tastes flat and thin.
- Yield and servingEnough for six to eight small glasses. It stays pourable, so serve it in stemmed glasses or cups with a spoon, and add the froth just before it goes to the table or it will slump.
- Other fruitThe note about jam and jelly is practical — a stiff preserve loosened with a little of the hot cream gives the same result off-season, and needs no straining because the seeds have already been dealt with.
Buckeye Cookery gives generous space to creams and custards because a household with access to real cream had a dessert available in minutes that required neither an oven nor ice. This one belongs to the older English family of "creams" — fruit purée bound with scalded cream — that predates the gelatin-set Bavarian creams. The instruction to whip a portion separately and drain the froth on a sieve is a survival of the eighteenth-century "whipt cream" technique, when cream was skimmed by hand and beating it produced as much thin liquid as foam; a straining cloth or sieve was standard equipment for the job. Raspberries appear often in Midwestern collections of this period, and one likely reason is that they grew readily in kitchen gardens and did not travel or keep, so recipes tended to assume a glut in July and a jar of jam for the rest of the year — which is exactly what the closing line offers.