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Cream, Whipped, with Liqueur
Proceed exactly as before, flavouring the cream, before whipping it, with any liqueur that may be wished. Double cream is the best for this purpose. Probable cost, 1s. 8d., exclusive of the liqueur. Sufficient for eight or ten glasses.
A cross-reference entry rather than a standalone method: it assumes you have just read the preceding instructions for plain whipped cream, which are sweetened with sifted sugar, whisked cold, and drained of loose liquid before serving.
- The hinge: add liqueur before whipping, and sparinglyThe hinge: add liqueur before whipping -- Alcohol weakens the protein-and-fat network that holds a foam, so a heavy hand gives a slack cream that will not hold its shape. The recipe sets no quantity; about a tablespoon of liqueur per cup of cream, whisked only to soft peaks, is a safe modern working figure.
- Double creamBritish double cream runs about 48 per cent butterfat. US heavy cream (minimum 36 per cent) or the lighter whipping cream (about 30-36 per cent) whips perfectly well but is thinner and more easily overbeaten once liqueur is in it.
- "Proceed exactly as before"The base method is the preceding plain whipped cream entry, which is not reproduced here; the standard period technique was to sweeten the cream lightly, whisk it cold, and lift the risen froth off to drain while the rest was whisked.
- SweeteningMost liqueurs are already sugary, so cut back on the sugar the plain recipe calls for. A teaspoon of caster or icing sugar per cup of cream is usually enough.
- Which liqueurMaraschino, noyau and curacao are the flavourings most often named in Victorian cookery books, with brandy used in the same way. Anything of similar strength works; cream liqueurs and coffee liqueurs will loosen the foam more because of their own sugar and fat load.
- Probable cost, 1s. 8d.Late-Victorian shorthand for one shilling and eightpence, given so a cook could price a dish against the household books. It is a period price marker, not a modern guide.
- Yield"Eight or ten glasses" suggests something on the order of a pint (an imperial pint is about 570 ml) of cream, whipped to two or three times its volume and spooned into small stemmed glasses. Modern portions in dessert bowls will stretch to fewer.
- ServingServe cold and soon after whipping. It is intended as a dessert in its own right, or as a topping for fruit, trifle or a compote, not as a stable piped decoration.
Flavoured whipped creams sat in a long English line running back through the syllabubs and "snows" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which cream was whisked with wine or spirits and sugar, the froth lifted off with a skimmer and piled into glasses. By the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary in the later nineteenth century, the fashion for imported liqueurs — maraschino from Dalmatia, curaçao, French noyau — had turned that older drink-cum-dessert into a quick sweet a cook could throw together from the store cupboard, which is why the entry is only two lines long and hangs off the plain cream recipe above it. The costing in shillings and pence is characteristic of the book's purpose: it was written for the mistress of a household as much as for the cook, and many entries addressed the question of what a dish would add to the week's bills.