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Solid Cream
Take half a pint of double cream, or cream which has stood for twenty-four hours before being skimmed. Sweeten it with an ounce of sugar and flavour pleasantly. Whisk it with an ordinary whisk in a cool place till it begins to thicken, then stop instantly. If the whisking is kept up too long the cream will curdle. It will be twice its original bulk.
A whipped cream in its simplest form, from the era before stabilisers and stand mixers. The instruction that matters is the one about stopping early.
- Half a pintAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups (roughly 285 ml). Whisked it will roughly double in bulk, as the recipe itself notes, giving around 2½ cups of soft cream.
- Double cream vs. heavy creamBritish double cream runs about 48% butterfat; American heavy cream is nearer 36%. The lower-fat version whips more slowly and to a softer body, while the richer double cream reaches the grainy stage fastest if over-beaten. Either way, watch it closely.
- Cream stood twenty-four hoursThe alternative given is the top of unhomogenised milk left to rise overnight and skimmed. Modern milk is homogenised and will not separate; buy cream instead, and buy it pasteurised rather than raw.
- An ounce of sugarAbout 2 tablespoons of caster or superfine sugar. Granulated will work but dissolves slowly in cold cream; icing sugar dissolves instantly and adds a trace of starch that helps the cream hold.
- Flavour pleasantlyThe recipe names nothing; period flavourings for sweetened cream included vanilla, a spoonful of brandy or maraschino, or a little grated lemon rind. Add liquid flavourings before whisking, not after, or you will have to beat the cream a second time.
- A cool placeWarm cream will not hold air. Chill the cream, the bowl and the whisk; on a hot day set the bowl over ice. This is the difference between a cream that doubles and one that stubbornly stays liquid.
- Stop instantlyThe hinge of the recipe. Once the whisk leaves visible tracks and the cream just holds a soft peak, stop — a few seconds more takes it to grainy, and beyond that to butter and buttermilk. If using an electric mixer, drop to the lowest speed at the end and finish by hand.
- If it does curdleCream taken slightly too far can often be rescued by whisking in a tablespoon or two of fresh unwhipped cream by hand. Once it has broken into butter granules it is past saving.
Whipping cream was, in a nineteenth-century kitchen, a technique with a measurable yield rather than a dish in itself — hence the closing note that the cream should reach twice its bulk. The recipe assumes a dairy household: cream is what rises to the top of standing milk and is lifted off with a skimmer, and the twenty-four-hour rest is simply the time needed for the fat globules to float. Older English cookery is generally said to have distinguished several creams by their handling — clotted or scalded cream in the West Country, whipt cream raised to a froth and lifted off with a skimmer in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and what has sometimes been called a later "solid" cream, whisked whole so that the whole body of it thickens rather than throwing up a foam to be collected. The warning against over-whisking is the same one every cook has needed since, but it carried more weight when half a pint of double cream represented a good part of a morning's skimming.