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Newport Whipped Cream
Pour one pint of sour or sweet cream into a bowl with one-fourth of a pint of fresh milk, half a lemon cut into slices, and wine and sugar to taste, whipping them well together. Take off the froth and serve it in jelly glasses.
This is a whipped syllabub under a resort name: the cream is beaten with wine, sugar and lemon, and only the foam that rises is served. A few things need translating before it will work in a modern kitchen.
- The hinge: skim, don't serve the bowlYou are collecting froth, not whipping cream to stiff peaks. Beat, lift off the risen foam with a skimmer or slotted spoon into the glasses, let the liquid stand and rise again, and repeat. Overbeating the whole bowl gives you a slack, curdled-looking mass instead of a light whip.
- "Sour cream" is not the tub in the dairy caseIn a nineteenth-century kitchen this meant cream that had naturally soured and thickened, closer to modern creme fraiche. Commercial cultured sour cream is often stabilised and is generally too thick to throw much of a foam. Heavy cream or creme fraiche is the workable reading.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups (about 475 ml); a quarter pint is half a cup. The milk is there to thin the cream enough that a froth can rise and separate.
- Wine and sugar to tasteThe original gives no quantity, and the amount matters. A workable starting point is a quarter to a third cup of sweet wine -- sherry, madeira or a white wine -- and two to three tablespoons of sugar per pint of cream, though period recipes vary widely in proportion. Dissolve the sugar in the wine and lemon first; acid added to already-whipped cream can break it.
- The lemonSliced lemon is for flavour and a little acid, not for pulp. Steep the slices in the wine and sugar, then lift them out before whipping so peel fragments do not end up in the glasses.
- Cold everythingCream, milk, bowl and whisk should all be well chilled. A warm bowl gives a coarse foam that collapses before it reaches the table.
- Jelly glassesSmall stemmed or straight-sided glasses, typically only a few ounces. Fill them and let them stand in the refrigerator; a well-made syllabub will usually hold its foam for a while, and a thin sweet wine layer settling at the bottom is expected rather than a fault.
- YieldA pint of cream plus the milk fills roughly six to eight small glasses, depending on how patiently you skim.
Syllabub — cream frothed with wine or cider, sweetened and flavoured with lemon — is an English confection documented from the sixteenth century onward, and the "whipt" version in which only the risen foam is served in small glasses was well established by the eighteenth. It crossed to America early and survived in genteel form well into the nineteenth century, here with a fashionable place-name attached rather than its old one. Newport, the Rhode Island resort, was a summer address of the sort of clientele such dishes were named for. The recipe's willingness to use cream that has soured on its own is a reminder of a kitchen with no reliable refrigeration, where slightly turned cream was an ingredient rather than a loss.