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Whipped Cream (Place cream over ice until)
Place cream over ice until thoroughly chilled, and whip with an egg-beater or whip-churn until it froths. While whipping place froth on a sieve, and return to bowl to be re-whipped all that passes through. When cream is difficult to whip, add to it and beat with it the white of an egg. Sweetened and flavored this is a choice dessert alone, but it may be served in various ways. Baked apples, and fresh or preserved berries are delicious with it. Jelly-glasses, one-third full of jelly and filled up with cream, make a very wholesome and delicious dessert.
This is whipped cream from the era before mechanical refrigeration, and nearly every instruction in it is about coping with cream that was richer, warmer and less predictable than what comes out of a carton today. The one thing worth carrying over is the sieve.
- Buy the right creamThe book assumes hand-skimmed cream, which could be very rich, though its fat content varied a good deal from one skimming to the next. Use heavy or whipping cream at 36 percent; "light cream" and half-and-half will not hold a froth at all. Ultra-pasteurized cream whips, but more slowly and to a slightly coarser foam.
- "Over ice" means genuinely coldSet the bowl in a larger bowl of ice water and chill the beaters too. Cream whips best between 35 and 40F; much above 50F the fat softens and you get foam that collapses into a puddle.
- The sieve is the real techniqueSkimming the froth onto a sieve lets the unwhipped liquid drain away so it can be beaten again, and it drains water out of the foam you have already made, which should give a drier foam than cream whipped straight through in one bowl. A fine-mesh strainer set over a second bowl does it.
- Whip-churnA syllabub or whip churn was a tall tin cylinder with a perforated plunger worked up and down by hand. A balloon whisk or a stand mixer on medium-high is the equivalent; medium-high rather than top speed gives a finer, more stable foam.
- Know when to stopSoft peaks for spooning over fruit, firm peaks for layering in glasses. A few strokes past firm peaks and the fat coalesces into butter — if that starts, a splash of cold unwhipped cream folded in will sometimes bring it back.
- The raw egg whiteAdding beaten egg white was a known fix for cream too thin or too warm to whip, and this book gives it. Raw white carries a small salmonella risk, so if you want the trick use pasteurized whites in a carton; better still, buy cream with enough fat that you do not need it.
- Sweetening and flavoringAbout 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar and half a teaspoon of vanilla per cup of cream. Add them once the cream has thickened slightly rather than at the start; superfine or confectioners' sugar dissolves without grittiness.
- Yield and holdingOne cup of cream gives roughly two cups whipped, enough for four servings over fruit. Whipped this way it will hold an hour or two refrigerated; drain off any weeping liquid before serving.
- The jelly-glass dessertFill a small glass a third with firm fruit jelly, top with sweetened cream, and chill. Use a set jelly rather than a loose preserve or the cream will sink into it.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was compiled from contributed household recipes, which is why this entry reads as a set of working instructions rather than a formula with measurements — its readers already had the cream. What they did not reliably have was cold. The instruction to place the cream over ice points to the commercial ice trade and the domestic icebox, which was spreading through American households in this period. The "whip-churn" named here appears to be a syllabub churn, a tin cylinder with a plunger; skimming whipped froth onto a sieve is a method found in eighteenth-century English syllabub and whipped-cream recipes, so the sieve step here follows an older practice.