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Whipped Milk
To a cup of evaporated milk, use a quarter of a teaspoonful of granulated gelatin. Soak the gelatin in two tablespoonfuls of the cold milk, heat the remaining milk until very hot, add the softened gelatin; when dissolved pour it into a bowl, set in another larger one containing cracked ice.
When the mixture is cold flavor with sugar and vanilla and whip until stiff. This is very good for emergencies, when you cannot get cream for making desserts.
A wartime-era stand-in for whipped cream that still works, provided everything involved is very cold. The gelatin is the whole trick: a quarter teaspoon is enough to hold air in a liquid that has no butterfat to speak of.
- Cold is the hingeEvaporated milk will not hold a foam unless it is close to freezing. After the gelatin is dissolved, chill the mixture until it is thoroughly cold and slushy at the edges — an hour or more in the refrigerator, or 20 minutes in the freezer. Chill the bowl and the beaters too.
- Evaporated, not condensedEvaporated milk is unsweetened concentrated milk. Sweetened condensed milk is a different product entirely and will not whip. Full-fat evaporated milk whips far better than the reduced-fat version.
- Granulated gelatinA quarter teaspoon of modern powdered unflavored gelatin is roughly a tenth of a standard envelope — measure it, do not eyeball it. Sheet gelatin can be substituted at about half a sheet, softened in cold water and squeezed out before dissolving.
- Heating the milk"Very hot" means hot enough to dissolve gelatin completely, around 120–140F. Boiling is unnecessary and gives the milk a cooked, caramel edge.
- Sugar and flavoringThe original gives no amounts. One to two tablespoons of sugar and half a teaspoon of vanilla per cup of milk is in line with sweetened whipped cream. Confectioners' sugar dissolves more readily into a cold foam than granulated.
- Whipping and volumeA hand mixer takes three to five minutes and the mixture expands substantially, perhaps doubling or tripling. Expect somewhere between two and three cups of foam from a cup of milk.
- It does not keepThis foam is held up by air and a trace of gelatin, not fat, and it tends to weep after standing. Best whipped shortly before serving rather than made well ahead.
Evaporated milk was a fixture of the interwar pantry because it was shelf-stable, cheap, and immune to the summer kitchen, where cream kept poorly. Cookery writers of the 1920s and 30s worked out that chilling evaporated milk hard enough would let it whip, and the pinch of gelatin here is an insurance policy against the foam collapsing before it reaches the table. It was the sort of thing spooned over stewed fruit, gelatin desserts or a plain cake, in a household that had no intention of buying cream for the purpose. The book's own phrasing — "very good for emergencies" — is worth noting: it is offered as a substitute and does not pretend otherwise.