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WHIPPED CREAM (a French recipe)
Put a quart of very thick cream into a pan; beat it with a whisk until it becomes entirely frothed, which will soon be the case if the weather be cold; or, to hasten the operation, put some pounded ice with a good handful of salt into a deep pan, and in it set you pan of cream. The froth will have a greater consistency if you put into the cream a piece of pounded gum-tragacanth about the size of a pea, or the white of an egg beaten up; but the former is preferable. If the froth forms slowly, take it off by degrees with a slicer, and lay it on a sieve covered with a fine cloth to drain till wanted for serving, which ought not to be long, or the froth will fall. What drains from it may be added to the rest and whipped. If the cream will not froth in a quarter of an hour it is not good for that purpose. When it has drained, mix three or four ounces of sifted sugar with it, and flavour according to taste as follows. A spoonful of orange-flower water, or a few orange-flowers pounded mixed with the sugar; or a tea-spoonful of the essence of roses, with a little rose-lake to colour it; or, pound a quarter of a stick of vanilla with one ounce of sugar, boil and strain, add two ounces of sifted sugar, and mix it with the cream; or, press the juice from four ounces of strawberries or raspberries, mix it with the sugar, and a little carmine to colour it. Lemon, orange, or any fruit you please may be used in the same way; or a small glassful of maraschino or any other liqueur may be added to the sugar to flavour the cream. (See CREAM, WHIPPED.)
This is the classic French method for crème fouettée, in which the froth is lifted off as it forms and drained rather than beaten to a uniform mass. The instructions assume a cellar-cool dairy and unhomogenised cream, and both of those need translating.
- The cream is the whole recipeUse heavy or double cream of at least 36% butterfat, and avoid ultra-pasteurised (UHT) cream, which foams reluctantly and collapses fast. The book's own test still applies: cream that has not frothed in fifteen minutes is not going to.
- QuantityA quart is 4 cups (an Imperial quart, if you are reading a British edition, is 40 fl oz or 5 cups). Whipped and drained, that yields enough for eight to twelve servings as a dessert cream or filling.
- Cold, not just coolThe ice-and-salt pan is a brine bath, colder than ice alone, and it does the work a refrigerator now does. Chill the cream, the bowl and the whisk; cream whips best below about 45F and turns grainy as it warms.
- Gum tragacanth and egg whiteTragacanth is a plant gum still sold as a thickener, mostly to sugarcraft suppliers; a pea-sized piece in a quart is a stabiliser, not a flavour. It is optional. Neither it nor a raw beaten egg white is needed if the cream is good, and the egg white brings a raw-egg risk the original did not consider.
- DrainingLifting the froth onto a cloth-lined sieve drains the thin, unwhipped cream out and gives a firmer, drier foam. Set the sieve over a bowl, return the drippings to the pan, and keep everything refrigerated while it drains.
- SugarThree or four ounces of sifted sugar (a fine caster sugar in period usage) is about half to two-thirds of a cup granulated, or roughly 3/4 to 1 cup if you substitute confectioners' sugar. Fold it in at the end, as written, rather than at the start, or the cream loosens.
- VanillaA quarter of a stick is about an inch and a half of pod. Split it, pound it with the sugar, then boil and strain as directed; a teaspoon of extract stirred in cold is the practical substitute.
- The colouringsSkip the rose-lake and carmine as given. Lake pigments of the period were not reliably food-grade, and cochineal-based carmine varies widely; modern food colouring or the fruit juice alone does the job.
- Serve it quicklyThe warning that the froth will fall is genuine. Drained whipped cream holds an hour or two refrigerated at best, and less once sugar and fruit juice are folded through.
This is French pastry-kitchen practice as it stood before mechanical refrigeration: cream whipped over a brine bath of pounded ice and salt, the froth skimmed off in stages and drained on a cloth so that only the stiffest foam reached the table. The flavourings listed — orange-flower water, essence of roses, vanilla, maraschino — are the standard nineteenth-century French repertoire, and the choice tells you the dish belonged to the confectioner rather than the plain cook. Gum tragacanth, harvested from Middle Eastern Astragalus shrubs, was a common stabiliser in that trade, used in pastillage and icings as well as here; its appearance in a domestic dictionary shows how far professional technique had filtered into the English middle-class kitchen.