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Mock Whipped Cream
1 cup milk 1 teaspoon flour 2 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Mix the flour, sugar and salt, with a little cold milk, together. Pour over this the hot milk, and cook until thickened. Beat for a minute or two, then cool, and flavor with vanilla.
A thickened milk sauce standing in for whipped cream, from the era when dairy fat was scarce or costly. It behaves like a thin pastry cream, not like cream, and it needs to be treated accordingly.
- The salt is missing from the listThe method says to mix flour, sugar and salt, but no salt appears among the ingredients. A pinch is presumably intended; the recipe gives no amount.
- Scald, then temperSlake the flour and sugar in a few tablespoons of the cold milk until smooth, then heat the remaining milk to just steaming and pour it in while stirring. Adding hot milk to dry flour gives lumps that no amount of beating will clear.
- Cook the flour out"Cook until thickened" understates it. Bring the mixture to a bare simmer and hold it two or three minutes, stirring constantly, or the sauce tastes of raw flour. One teaspoon of flour to a cup of milk gives a pouring consistency, closer to a thin custard sauce than to anything spoonable.
- Beat cold, not warmThe instruction to beat for a minute or two is about breaking up the skin and lightening the texture. It will not aerate into peaks. Chill it thoroughly first, then whisk hard; a cold sauce holds what little air it takes up.
- Add vanilla off the heatFlavour after cooling, as written. Vanilla extract is alcohol-based and loses most of its aroma in a hot pan.
- Skin and storagePress a piece of parchment or plastic directly onto the surface as it cools, or you will beat a rubbery skin back through the sauce. It keeps two days refrigerated and will thicken further as it sits; loosen with a spoonful of milk.
- Yield and useAbout one cup, enough to sauce four servings of stewed fruit, gingerbread or pudding. It is a substitute for pouring cream rather than for a piped topping, and it will not hold a shape on a pie.
"Mock" dishes run right through Anglo-American cookery — mock turtle, mock duck, mock apple pie — and almost all of them exist because something real was expensive, rationed or simply unavailable to the household in question. This sauce is a very lean thing indeed: flour and milk, the standard thickening pair of the period, doing the work that fat would otherwise do, and no egg at all. The technique of slaking starch in cold liquid before adding hot is older than any of these books and is the reason the recipe survives as more than a curiosity — it is still how a flour-thickened sauce is begun.