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Pimiento Cream
Mix 1/4 cup cream Few grains salt and 2 tablespoons pimiento, rubbed through a sieve. Beat until stiff and serve on bouillon or on any cream soup.
A soup garnish rather than a dish: two tablespoons of sieved pimiento folded into a quarter cup of whipped cream, dropped on hot bouillon or a cream soup. The whole thing takes five minutes, and the only real difficulty is getting cream to stiffen once liquid has been added to it.
- Whip first, then foldThe original says to mix everything and then beat until stiff, but pimiento purée is wet and acidic and will fight the cream. Whip the cold cream to firm peaks on its own, then fold the sieved pimiento in with a spatula.
- Cream means heavy creamUse heavy or whipping cream at 36% fat or above, straight from the refrigerator. Light cream and half-and-half will not whip at all; ultra-pasteurized cream whips less readily and holds less well, and aerosol canned cream is no substitute. A chilled bowl helps.
- PimientoCanned or jarred pimientos, which are skinned roasted sweet red peppers, mild and sold in small tins. Drain them well and press hard, or the extra brine will thin the cream. A small food processor does the sieving faster than a sieve.
- QuantityA quarter cup of cream whips up to roughly half a cup, and the pimiento adds to that; enough for a spoonful on each of several cups of soup. Scale up if you are serving more; it does not keep.
- Serve at onceSpoon it onto the soup at the table. Sitting on hot liquid it slackens quickly, and unstabilized whipped cream left standing in the bowl will begin to weep.
- Season for the soup underneath"Few grains salt" is right for a clear bouillon. On a bland cream of celery or potato soup the garnish carries more of the flavor, so taste it and salt a little harder.
This comes from Alice Bradley's For Luncheon and Supper Guests, a 1920s American book of light dishes for entertaining, written when the domestic-science movement had made the garnished cream soup a fixture of ladies' luncheons. Pimientos in a tin were a comparatively new convenience at that point: the variety and its name are Spanish, though Capsicum peppers themselves come from the Americas, and canning it commercially in the United States is generally traced to Georgia growers in the first years of the twentieth century, after which cheap tins made bright red flecks available to any cook year round. Pimiento could then supply color to otherwise pale food, from cheese spreads to this whipped cream. Note that the cream here is unsweetened and used savory.