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Strawberry Cream
Remove the stems from about a pound and a half of ripe strawberries, pass them through a fine hair-sieve into a basin, mix in one heaping tablespoonful of powdered sugar and stir constantly until the sugar has dissolved. Mix two tablespoonfuls of arrowroot with a small quantity of cold milk, then pour on it gradually one quart of boiling cream; turn the cream into a saucepan and boil it for a minute or two, stirring it all the time. Put the puree of strawberries into a dish and when slightly cooled pour the cream over them. Place the dish in a cold spot until the cream has set. Whisk the whites of half a dozen eggs to a stiff froth; put half of the beaten egg over the strawberries, color the remainder with a little prepared cochineal and fleck it about on the top It is then ready for serving. Spinach greening may be used in place of the cochineal if desired.
A late-Victorian moulded cream, thickened with arrowroot and finished with an uncooked meringue. The base is sound; the topping is the problem.
- Why the cautionThe whites of six eggs are whisked raw, spread over a chilled dessert, and served without any cooking, baking or heating. Nothing in the method brings them near a temperature that would address Salmonella, and the dish then sits at room temperature while it is served. Use a current recipe if you want a strawberry cream with a meringue finish.
- The set is fragileTwo tablespoonfuls of arrowroot to a quart of cream gives a barely-set custard, closer to a thick pouring cream than a moulded pudding. Arrowroot also thins if boiled hard or held long over heat, which may be why the original limits the boil to a minute or two.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve was the standard tool for purees that must not touch iron or tin. A nylon or stainless drum sieve does the same job; the point is to remove the seeds, which a blender will not.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually means finely ground white sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. One heaping tablespoon for a pound and a half of berries is very restrained by modern taste.
- CochinealPrepared cochineal was a liquid carmine colouring made from the dried insect, sold by grocers and chemists. It survives on labels as carmine or E120 and is still permitted, though it is not vegetarian.
- Spinach greeningThe alternative is spinach juice, wrung out and gently heated so the green pigment coagulates and can be lifted off. It was the standard kitchen green before synthetic colours, and it tastes faintly of spinach.
- YieldA quart of cream plus a pound and a half of fruit is a party dish; the recipe gives no yield, but the quantities would suggest something in the region of ten to twelve servings.
Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his Cook Book in 1896; it collects the hotel's working repertoire alongside a great deal of standard household cookery of the day. Fruit creams of this type — a fruit puree set with a thickened dairy base and masked with beaten whites — belong to a long line of English and French moulded creams that runs back through eighteenth-century whipt syllabubs and fools. Arrowroot, imported chiefly from the West Indies, was the fashionable thickener of the period because it sets clear and tastes of nothing, unlike flour, and it carried a reputation as an invalid food that made it welcome in respectable kitchens. The two-tone finish, half plain white and half tinted with cochineal, is very much of its moment: colour was applied to sweets for display, and a dessert that arrived at the table flecked pink was doing the work that a garnish of whole berries does now.