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Whipped Cream Dressing
2 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1/2 cup thick cream 1/4 teaspoon salt Mix the lemon juice, sugar, and salt. Whip the cream, not too stiff, then add to it the mixed lemon juice, sugar, and salt. Care must be taken not to stir the mixture too much when the acid is added.
A soft, sweet-sour dressing for fruit salads, of the sort that filled the salad chapter of American cookbooks a century ago. The whole recipe turns on one point: the acid goes in last, and gently.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirLemon juice thickens cream fast and will turn it grainy or buttery if worked after the acid is in. Fold the sweetened juice through in a few strokes with a spatula and stop while it still looks loose.
- "Thick cream"This means heavy or whipping cream, roughly 30 to 36 percent fat or more. Cream labelled light or single cream, at around 18 percent, will not hold air and will simply thin into a sauce when the lemon hits it.
- Whip to soft peaks"Not too stiff" is deliberate. Stop when the whisk leaves a trail that slumps back on itself; the acid will firm the mixture up further on its own.
- Dissolve the sugar firstTwo tablespoons of granulated sugar need a minute in the lemon juice with the salt before they go anywhere near the cream. Undissolved sugar stays gritty, because there is no heat and no long standing time to smooth it out.
- Cold everythingChill the cream, bowl and whisk. Cold cream whips to a finer, more stable foam and is far less likely to break when the juice is added.
- Yield and timingHalf a cup of cream gives roughly a cup of dressing, enough for several servings of fruit salad. It is best made shortly before serving; it weeps if it stands, and it cannot usefully be re-whipped.
- What to put it onIt suits cut fruit, canned pears or peaches, and the old-fashioned combinations of apple, celery and nuts. It is too soft for leafy greens, which it merely wilts.
Cream dressings like this one belong to the era when "salad" in an American household often meant fruit, and the dressing was expected to be sweet. Period cookbooks offered several alternatives -- a French dressing of oil and vinegar, a cooked or "boiled" dressing thickened with egg, mayonnaise, or a whipped cream dressing, which needed no stove. The recipe's own warning to add the acid last and stir as little as possible reflects a practical awareness that acid stiffens and can then break a cream foam. Lemon juice would also have helped keep cut apples and pears from browning in the bowl.