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Whipped Cream and Its Uses
Cream to whip nicely must be perfectly sweet. If it is not, the beating will develop tiny particles of butter. The cream must not be too thin and must be thoroughly chilled. One-half pint of cream will be sufficient for serving six persons, as when whipped it more than doubles in bulk. Place the cream in a cold dish, one rather narrow and deep. The ordinary quart tin cup used in all kitchens is convenient for this purpose. Place the egg beater in the cream and slowly and gradually turn the crank, as in beating eggs. The cream will grow thicker as the beating continues until it is so thick that a teaspoon placed in it will stand solidly upright without other support. This will require from fifteen to twenty-five minutes. Care must be taken at the last not to beat it too long as there is always the danger that the cream may granulate. Remove the beater, shake it clean and with a tablespoon place the whipped cream by the spoon in the fancy serving dish. There will usually be found at the bottom of the dish a quantity of thin cream that has not whipped. This should not be placed with the rest as it but serves to thin the whole. The cream should be set in a cold place until wanted and may be prepared some two hours or more before using.
Whipped cream is used in many ways, not alone or desserts, but in broths and also in coffee and chocolate. It may be served with clam broth (see chapter on Soups), adding delicacy to the flavor and richness to the quality, and the experienced cook will doubtless find various other broths and soups which it will improve. Served with coffee or chocolate it renders either most delicious.
A technique page rather than a dish, and most of it still holds. The main differences are the cream itself and the time involved.
- "Perfectly sweet" means fresh, not sugaredIn period usage sweet cream is cream that has not begun to sour. Faintly turned cream breaks into butter grains under the beater, which is exactly the failure described here. Nothing in this recipe is sweetened.
- Buy the right creamAsk for heavy or whipping cream at 36 percent fat or above. Ultra-pasteurized cream whips but takes longer and holds less air; light cream and half-and-half will not whip at all, which is the "too thin" the author warns against.
- QuantitiesHalf a pint is one cup, yielding a little over two cups whipped and serving six by the standards of the day. A quart tin cup is roughly a four-cup measuring jug, and its narrow depth is still the right shape for a hand beater.
- Fifteen to twenty-five minutes is a hand-crank figureWith an electric hand mixer on medium the same cup of cream reaches spoon-standing stiffness in two to three minutes, with a stand mixer rather less. Judge by the cream, not the clock.
- The granulation warning is the hingePast stiff peaks the fat globules coalesce and the cream turns grainy, then buttery. Slightly over-beaten cream can sometimes be brought back by folding in a little fresh unwhipped cream; once it has broken to butter it cannot. Stop while the peaks still look glossy; if you are working by hand at the end, switch to a whisk for the last few turns.
- Cold everythingChill the cream, the bowl and the beater. Fat that warms above about 50F whips sluggishly and deflates fast, which is why the finished cream is told to go straight to a cold place.
- The thin cream in the bottomSound advice and worth following. Spoon the whipped cream off and keep the unwhipped liquid for coffee or a sauce rather than folding it back in.
- Holding it two hoursUnsweetened cream will weep after an hour or so in a modern refrigerator. A tablespoon of confectioners' sugar per cup, whipped in near the end, helps it stand; drain any pooled liquid before serving.
Whipped cream long predates the egg beater: European cooks of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made "snow" by whisking cream with bundles of twigs or straw and skimming the froth off the top, sometimes over a long stretch of beating. What changed in the nineteenth century was the rotary hand beater, the geared "Dover" type being common enough in American kitchens by the 1890s that this writer can assume one and simply say "place the egg beater in the cream." That mechanical shortcut is part of why a book aimed at ordinary households could treat whipped cream as an everyday garnish rather than a confectioner's trick. The suggestion of floating it on clam broth reads oddly now but fits the period's fondness for enriched clear soups, and whipped cream on coffee and chocolate was a fashion of the same decades in American hotels and ice-cream parlors.