Home › At the Fountain › Whipped Cream (Place cream to be whipped)
Whipped Cream (Place cream to be whipped)
Place cream to be whipped in American Cream Whipper. Put dasher in place in bowl, put on cover, and revolve handle a couple of minutes and , and revolve handle a couple of minutes and cream will be whipped solid. Remove dasher to wash. Place cover on bowl, and stand on counter where it is ready to serve. and best This is the quickest way to prepare whipped cream.
This is less a formula than a set of instructions for a piece of counter equipment that no longer exists. The technique still works; the assumptions about cream and storage do not.
- The American Cream WhipperFrom the text, a lidded bowl with an internal dasher turned by a crank handle; devices of this kind were sold to the fountain and restaurant trade as a faster alternative to a wire whisk. A stand mixer with the whisk attachment, or a hand mixer, does the same job in the same couple of minutes.
- Cream to useThe original specifies nothing beyond 'cream'. Use heavy or whipping cream at 36 percent fat or above; anything labelled light cream or half-and-half will not hold. Ultra-pasteurized cream whips but generally takes longer and holds less well.
- Cold is the whole trickCream whips on chilled fat globules. Cream straight from the refrigerator, in a bowl and with a beater that have been in the freezer ten minutes, will stiffen far faster than anything at room temperature.
- "Whipped solid"Read this as stiff peaks, not beyond. Another thirty seconds past that point breaks the emulsion and you have grainy cream on its way to butter. If it does break, a splash of fresh liquid cream folded in by hand will sometimes bring it back.
- Unsweetened by defaultNo sugar or vanilla appears in the original at all. For domestic use, roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar and half a teaspoon of vanilla per cup of cream, added once the cream has begun to thicken.
- Do not stand it on the counterThe instruction to leave the covered bowl out assumes cream that will be served almost immediately. Whipped cream held at room temperature weeps and, if it sits long, becomes a growth medium. Keep it refrigerated and use it within a few hours.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity. Cream roughly doubles in volume: one cup of heavy cream gives about two cups whipped.
- The garbled textThe duplicated phrases and the stray 'and best' are errors in the text as transmitted, not missing steps.
This comes from the working literature of the American soda fountain, a trade that between about 1880 and Prohibition turned the drugstore counter into a short-order kitchen with its own catalogue of specialized hardware. Fountains needed whipped cream in quantity and needed it fast, and firms selling to the trade supplied crank-driven whippers, syrup pumps, shaved-ice machines and mineral-water draft arms. That the entry names a specific branded device rather than describing a technique suggests these books were aimed at dispensers who were buying equipment as much as learning recipes. Pressurized nitrous-oxide cream siphons, which eventually displaced the geared whipper at the counter, are generally traced to the 1930s.