To Whip Cream
1 pint whipped cream 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon flavoring Chill the cream by placing in the inner portion of a double boiler and surround with chipped ice to which a little salt has been added. By chilling the cream a lighter cream may be used than otherwise. When thoroughly chilled, add the sugar and flavoring. Beat with a Dover egg beater until light and foamy. Remove the foamy portion. Place in a strainer over a receptacle and allow to drain. Repeat this process until all the cream has been used. Whipped cream is one of the most easily digested forms of fat.
A method rather than a dish: the technique of skimming and draining belongs to an era when cream came at unpredictable butterfat levels. With modern cream most of it is unnecessary, but the chilling advice still holds.
- The ingredient line"1 pint whipped cream" means one pint of cream to be whipped, not two pints of finished foam. A pint is 2 cups and yields roughly 4 cups whipped, serving 8 to 10 as a dessert topping.
- What cream to buyUse heavy cream or heavy whipping cream, 36 percent butterfat or higher. Anything labelled light cream, half-and-half or coffee cream will not whip no matter how cold it is.
- Skip the skimmingThe business of removing the foamy portion, straining it and repeating probably reflects cream of variable and often low butterfat, only part of which would take air; the recipe's own note that chilling allows "a lighter cream" points that way. Modern heavy cream whips through in one pass, so beat the whole pint at once and ignore the strainer.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater. A balloon whisk, hand mixer on medium, or stand mixer with the whisk attachment all do the job; a stand mixer works fastest but overshoots most easily.
- The chilling still mattersFat globules must be firm to trap air. The ice-and-salt bath is an efficient way to get there, but a bowl and beaters chilled 15 minutes in the freezer, with the cream straight from the refrigerator, works as well. Cream above about 50F will loosen and refuse to hold peaks.
- Sugar and flavoringA tablespoon and a half of sugar per pint is a light hand by modern taste; superfine or confectioners' sugar dissolves without grit. The unnamed flavoring is most likely vanilla extract, though the recipe does not say. The original adds both before beating; adding them once the cream has begun to thicken tends to give more volume.
- Stop before butter"Light and foamy" is soft-peak stage. Take it to soft or medium peaks for spooning and folding; a few strokes past stiff and the emulsion begins to break into butter and buttermilk. Cream just past the point can sometimes be rescued by folding in a little fresh liquid cream, but once it has fully broken it is butter.
- Holding itSweetened whipped cream will weep within a few hours. Whip close to serving, or stabilize with a tablespoon of skim milk powder or a teaspoon of cornstarch beaten in with the sugar.
This entry comes from the sauces chapter of a meatless cookery book, of a kind with the vegetarian and reform-diet cooking published in the United States in the early twentieth century, some of it connected to health-reform institutions. The closing line — that whipped cream is among the most easily digested forms of fat — is characteristic of that literature, which routinely ranked foods by digestibility, a preoccupation of period nutrition writing rather than a claim modern science frames the same way. The technique itself appears to record a real problem of the pre-standardization dairy: before cream was reliably separated mechanically to consistent butterfat levels and sold by grade, a cook could not be sure whether the cream in hand would whip, and this recipe accordingly has her chill it hard, beat it, lift off whatever foam formed, drain the rest and repeat. The Dover beater named here was the common American rotary egg beater of the period — the Dover Stamping Company's beater rested on a patent of 1870 — and the brand name came to stand in for the tool.