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Whipped Cream Sauce
Sauce a la Chantilly. 1 quart of thick sweet cream. 4, 6, or 8 ounces of sugar. 1/2 pint of sweet wine--such as raisin, canary, California angelic, or Madeira. Vanilla, rose, almond or any other flavor as may be required.
Have the cream cold and whip to a partial froth as wanted, either in a whip-churn or deep bowl set in ice.
A sweetened, wine-flavored whipped cream meant to be spooned over puddings, pies and stewed fruit rather than piped. The book assumes a bakery-scale batch and a cook who knows when to stop whipping.
- YieldA quart of cream roughly doubles in volume, so this makes something over two quarts of sauce once the wine goes in. To quarter it: 1 cup cream, 2 to 4 tablespoons sugar, 1/4 cup wine.
- "Partial froth" is the whole pointThis is a sauce, not a topping. Stop while the cream still flows off the whisk in a thick ribbon and holds only the faintest trace -- soft peaks or just short of them. Whipped to stiff peaks it will not pour, and a few strokes past that it breaks into butter and buttermilk.
- The sugar rangeFour ounces per quart (about 1/2 cup) is lightly sweet, eight ounces (about 1 cup) is dessert-sweet; the recipe does not say which level went with what. Use superfine or confectioners' sugar so it dissolves before the cream is stiff; granulated sugar folded into cold cream can stay gritty.
- The winesCanary was a sweet wine from the Canary Islands, often fortified, and the historic style is essentially gone from the market. California "angelic" is Angelica, a sweet fortified wine still made in small quantities. Any sweet Madeira, cream sherry, Marsala or muscat stands in; a half pint to a quart of cream is a generous 1:4 ratio.
- Add the wine last, and coldA half pint of liquid will slacken whipped cream badly and its acidity can make the cream look curdled. Whip the cream and sugar first, then fold the chilled wine in by hand a little at a time, stopping when the sauce is still thick enough to coat a spoon.
- Whip-churnA hand-cranked churn-type cream whipper, one of several such devices sold in this period. A stand mixer on medium rather than high gives the same steady, controllable aeration; a balloon whisk in a metal bowl over ice gives the most control of all.
- Cream itself"Thick sweet cream" means fresh (not soured) heavy cream. Modern ultra-pasteurized cream whips but holds less well; standard pasteurized heavy cream, 36 percent fat or better, gives a firmer, longer-lasting froth.
- Flavoring quantitiesThe original leaves these to judgment. For a quart of cream: 1 tablespoon vanilla extract, or 2 teaspoons rosewater, or 1/2 teaspoon almond extract, added with the wine and tasted as you go.
- HoldingWine-slackened cream weeps within an hour or two. Whip it as close to service as possible, keep it refrigerated, and re-whisk lightly by hand if it separates.
The name points to the Château de Chantilly north of Paris, whose kitchens are traditionally credited with popularizing sweetened whipped cream in the seventeenth or eighteenth century -- the attribution to the maître d'hôtel François Vatel is commonly repeated but not documented, and sweetened whipped cream was being made across Europe well before the term attached itself to Chantilly. What is distinctly American here is the wine list: raisin wine and California Angelica appear beside Madeira and Canary. The recipe's structure -- a quart of cream, a range of sugar weights, flavor "as may be required" -- leaves the proportions open, so that the same base could be adjusted to suit whatever dessert it went beside.