Home › Frozen Desserts › Mock Cream
Mock Cream
1 level teaspoon cornstarch 1 level tablespoon sugar 1 cup scalding milk White of 1 egg 1 teaspoon vanilla Mix the cornstarch and sugar thoroughly; on them slowly pour the scalding milk, stirring all the while. Cook and stir in a double boiler for ten minutes; then set aside to cool. When ready to use stir in the vanilla and the white of the egg, stiffly beaten. Serve in place of whipped cream. •
A cornstarch-thickened milk base lightened with beaten egg white, meant to stretch or replace whipped cream. The cooked part is sound; the finish is not, because the egg white goes in raw and the dish is served cold without any further heating.
- Why this one failsThe stiffly beaten white of one egg is folded into an already cooled base and served immediately, so nothing in the finished dish ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Unlike raw egg stirred into a batter, this white is never cooked at any point. Use a current recipe for a cooked or pasteurized-white topping instead.
- Scalding milk"Scalding" means brought just to the point where bubbles form at the edge of the pan, around 180F, not a rolling boil. Scalding was routine in period recipes; keeping milk safe at a time when much of it was unpasteurized may have been part of the reason.
- The double boilerTen minutes over simmering water is not padding. Cornstarch needs sustained heat well above its gelling point to lose its raw, chalky taste, and the indirect heat keeps a thin milk mixture from scorching or curdling.
- Level measuresThe recipe specifies level teaspoons and tablespoons, at a period when level measurement was being actively promoted in cookery instruction. One level teaspoon of cornstarch to one cup of milk gives a pourable sauce, not a pudding.
- YieldAbout one cup, or roughly enough to top four modest servings of pie or stewed fruit — a single egg white adds volume but very little body once it stands.
- HoldingThe cooked base is meant to be made ahead and the beaten white added only "when ready to use"; once the foam is in, the mixture will lose volume and begin to separate fairly quickly, so it is not a topping to hold.
Mock creams belong to a long line of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century "mock" dishes — mock turtle, mock duck, mock apple pie — in which cheap staples stand in for something expensive or unavailable. Cream was the perishable luxury of the pre-refrigeration household: it soured fast, cost more than milk, and in cities was often watered or adulterated before it reached the kitchen. Cornstarch, which became widely available in American groceries in the second half of the 1800s, gave cooks a reliable way to thicken plain milk into something that could be spooned over a dessert. A substitute that cost a few cents and used a single egg white was exactly the kind of thrift such recipes were prized for.