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Vanilla Whipped Cream
Boil a little vanilla in a small quantity of milk, strain it, and add the milk to one pint of cream, together with a small quantity of gum tragacanth, a little orange-flower water, and sufficient powdered white sugar to sweeten it. Whip all these together to a froth, and pile it on a glass dish.
A stabilized whipped cream from the era before gelatin sheets and cans of aerosol cream. Most of the work is in the infusion; the rest is a matter of temperature.
- Vanilla means a beanThe recipe's "a little vanilla" most likely means a piece of vanilla bean simmered in a few tablespoons of milk and then strained out; the instruction to strain implies something solid. If you use extract instead, skip the milk step entirely and add half a teaspoon directly to the cream — boiling extract drives off the aromatics you paid for.
- Gum tragacanthA plant gum used as a stabilizer, still sold for sugar paste and floristry work. It needs to be hydrated: whisk no more than 1/8 teaspoon into the warm strained milk and let it stand until smooth, or it will seize into slippery lumps in the cream. Xanthan gum in the same tiny quantity, or a tablespoon of instant nonfat milk powder, does the same job of keeping the cream standing for a few hours.
- Orange-flower waterStill available in Middle Eastern groceries and better supermarkets. Modern bottles are potent — start with a quarter teaspoon for a pint of cream and taste, since "a little" in 1896 covered a wide range and too much reads as soap.
- CreamA pint is two cups. Use heavy or whipping cream at 36% fat or above; ultra-pasteurized whips more slowly and holds less air but will work. Anything labeled light cream will not whip at all.
- Cool the milk firstThe infused milk must be thoroughly cold before it meets the cream, and the cream itself should come straight from the refrigerator. Warm liquid added to cream is the usual reason a batch refuses to thicken.
- Powdered white sugarIn 1896 "powdered" generally meant sugar ground fine, nearer to modern superfine than to today's confectioners' sugar; either will work here. Two to three tablespoons per pint is a reasonable sweetening, and if you use modern confectioners' sugar the cornstarch in it adds a little stabilizing help of its own.
- Whip to a froth, not to butterStop at soft, barely holding peaks — the gum will firm things up as it stands. Pushing past medium peaks with a stand mixer separates the fat and turns the mixture grainy in seconds.
- YieldA pint of cream roughly doubles, giving about a quart of whipped cream: eight to ten servings piled on a dish, or enough to garnish a dozen individual desserts. Assemble within two or three hours of serving and keep it cold.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf dining rooms at a moment when pastry cooks stabilized whipped cream by hand with plant gums — among them tragacanth, gathered as dried sap from Middle Eastern Astragalus shrubs, though its place in nineteenth-century confectioners' manuals is chiefly in gum paste and pastillage rather than in creams. The pairing of vanilla with orange-flower water points back to French practice, where distilled flower waters flavored creams and ices long before vanilla became cheap enough to use alone. The instruction to pile the cream on a glass dish suggests it was not a filling or a garnish but a dessert in its own right, sent out to be admired before it was eaten.