Peachy Filling
1 jar cream (1/2 pint) 1 cup sugar 3 tbsp. cocoa 1 tsp. vanilla Set on ice to cool, one hour. Beat until stiff enough to spread. Spread between layers.
— Mrs. Edw. Bollinger
A whipped-cream cake filling of the plainest kind, and it lives or dies on the fat content of the cream and how cold everything is. The name has nothing to do with peaches.
- The jar of creamA half pint is one cup. Buy heavy cream or heavy whipping cream at 36 percent fat or more; anything labelled light cream or half-and-half will not whip no matter how long you beat it.
- Set on iceThe instruction is the hinge. Cream whips because the fat is solid enough to trap air, so chill the cream, the bowl and the beaters. An hour in the refrigerator, or fifteen minutes in the freezer for the bowl, does what the icebox did.
- CocoaUnsweetened natural cocoa, not Dutch-process drinking chocolate and not a sweetened mix. Three tablespoons in one cup of cream gives a quite dark filling.
- LumpsWhisk the sugar and cocoa together dry before adding them to the cream, or sift them in. Dry cocoa dropped straight onto cold cream clumps and will not disperse once the cream starts to thicken.
- When to stop"Stiff enough to spread" is stiff peaks, not beyond. A few seconds too long and the fat breaks and the mixture turns grainy and yellowish; if it is close, finish the last turns by hand with a whisk.
- YieldOne cup of cream roughly doubles in volume, enough to fill between the layers of a two-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. Double it if you want to cover the top as well.
- KeepingCream filling is perishable and unstabilised. Assemble the cake the day it is served and keep it refrigerated; it will begin to weep and soften the crumb within a day.
The Philathea Cook Book comes out of the Baraca–Philathea movement, the adult Sunday-school classes for young men (Baraca) and young women (Philathea) that spread through American Protestant churches from the 1890s onward; the recipe books they compiled were fundraisers, and contributions are typically signed with the donor's married name, as Mrs. Edw. Bollinger's is here. "Peachy" is period slang, current in the first decades of the twentieth century, meaning simply excellent or first-rate. The filling suggests a household with reliable access to ice and to cream sold by the jar rather than a carton, and sweetened whipped cream between cake layers would have been a comparatively rich alternative to a boiled or confectioners' sugar frosting.