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Cream, Whipped
The white of one egg should be allowed for every pint of good, thick cream. If this cannot be procured, more eggs must be used. A good-looking dish may be made by boiling a quart of milk down to a pint, and mixing with it the whites of three eggs. Sweeten and flavour the cream before using it. A plain whipped cream is made by rubbing the rind of a lemon upon three ounces of loaf sugar, and pounding it in a mortar, then mixing it with a glass of sherry or half a glass of brandy, the white of an egg beaten to a solid froth, and afterwards with the cream. Whip it to a froth with a scrupulously clean whisk. As it rises, take it off by table-spoonfuls, and put it on a sieve to drain. It is a good plan to whip the cream the day before it is wanted, as it is so much firmer. It should be made in a cool place, and kept in the same. It may be served in a variety of ways, either in glasses, or in a glass dish, when it should be prettily garnished, or surrounded by spongecake, macaroons, or ratafias. A spongecake may be made in the shape of a hollow cylinder, and filled with as much whipped cream as it will hold. Its appearance is improved by colouring part of it before whipping it (see COLOURING). Many persons dissolve a tea-spoonful of powdered gum arabic in a little orange-flower water, and add this to the cream. It keeps the froth firmer. Double cream may be simply whipped by whisking it with a wire whisk until it thickens. If beaten too long it will turn.
A Victorian reference entry rather than a single recipe: it gathers several ways of stretching, flavouring and stiffening whipped cream. The raw egg white that runs through most of it is the problem — see the last two points.
- Raw egg white, never cookedEvery version here except the final sentence folds unpasteurised raw egg white into cream that is then chilled, drained and served without heat. Raw shell eggs carry a Salmonella risk that the recipe's own advice — whip it the day before and keep it in a cool place — only extends, since the mixture sits for many hours at cellar rather than refrigerator temperature. Use a current recipe if you want a cream stiffened with egg.
- The reduced-milk versionBoiling a quart of milk down to a pint and beating in three raw whites is a thrift dressing for a dish that has no cream in it. The reduction is harmless; the three uncooked whites, held overnight, are the same hazard multiplied.
- Loaf sugar and lemon rindLoaf sugar was cut from a hard cone and pounded as needed; rubbing the whole lemon on it lifts the zest oil into the sugar. Granulated or caster sugar rubbed with finely grated zest does the same work — this is a flavouring method, not a chemistry one.
- Gum arabicStill sold as a food additive (E414) and still used to hold foams, though a teaspoonful dissolved in orange-flower water is a very old-fashioned way of doing it. It is not a preservative and does nothing about the egg.
- "If beaten too long it will turn"Turning means the fat globules coalescing into butter and buttermilk. Double cream at around 48 per cent fat, cold, in a cold bowl, goes from soft peaks to grainy in a matter of seconds; stop while the whisk still leaves a trail that slumps slightly.
- Draining on a sieveLifting the risen froth off by the spoonful and letting it drain is how cooks got a firm, dry cream before stabilisers. It works because the loose liquid separates out and drips away, leaving the stiffer foam behind.
- RatafiasSmall hard almond macaroons, once flavoured with bitter almond or ratafia essence. Amaretti are the nearest thing on a modern shelf.
- "Colouring"The instruction points to a separate entry on colouring elsewhere in the book, which is not reproduced here; period colourings of this kind typically included things like cochineal, spinach green and saffron. Some Victorian colourings were mineral-based and would not be regarded as food substances today, so modern food colours are the sensible reading of the instruction.
Whipped cream as a dressing rather than a filling belongs to a long line of English and French sweet froths — the syllabubs and "snow creams" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where cream was whisked with wine and sugar, the risen foam skimmed off with a spoon and drained on a sieve exactly as described here. The egg white may well be an echo of that tradition, though the reason for it is a matter of speculation rather than record. That the recipe opens with a ratio of whites to cream, and offers a reduced-milk version for households that cannot get cream at all, says a good deal about the Victorian dairy supply, where cream quality varied by district, season and how far the milk had travelled.