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Whipped Cream
This is made from cream that has been left for a day or two before being skimmed from the milk. It should be placed in a large basin, and set on ice, so that it may be kept cool while it is being whipped. This should be done with a whisk and is to be continued until the cream is frothed. A little white of egg and gum-water will make it stand better, and it should only be made just before it is wanted for use, the sugar required to sweeten it and also the flavoring being put in the last thing. By removing the froth with a spoon as it forms and putting it on a coarse hair-sieve, the free cream runs through, leaving froth only; the liquid cream may be put back to the other cream being whipped.
Whipped Cream Flavored with Brandy, Coffee, Curacoa, Rum, Etc. Pour one pint of fresh cream into a basin, and place it over a larger basin containing broken ice. Beat the cream with a wire whisk, moderately at first, but faster as the froth begins to form, and then whip in one gill of brandy, liquid extract of coffee, or other flavoring. Beat until all is worked in, and then turn the cream froth into a glass dish and place it in an ice-chest to keep it cool until required for serving. The froth may be set on a fine silk-sieve to drain, and the cream should drip from it to be returned to the basin for further whipping.
Two related sets of instructions: plain whipped cream, and cream whipped with a spirit or essence. The vocabulary is late-nineteenth-century and one measurement is far out of line with modern cream.
- The hinge: keep it cold, stop earlyCream at around 40F whips to a stable froth; cream that is allowed to warm whips poorly and is far more likely to churn into butter and buttermilk under continued beating. Chill bowl and whisk, and stop while the cream still slumps slightly when the whisk is lifted, since folding and serving will stiffen it further.
- "Cream left a day or two before being skimmed"This is unpasteurized cream that had risen on standing milk and would have been slightly ripened by the time it was lifted off. Use pasteurized heavy or whipping cream, 36 percent fat or better. Avoid ultra-pasteurized (UHT) cream, which foams reluctantly and drains quickly.
- Skip the egg whiteThe "little white of egg" is a stabilizer, and in this dish it is never cooked. Modern high-fat cream does not need it; if you want extra body, a spoonful of confectioners' sugar, whose cornstarch absorbs free liquid, does the same work.
- Gum-waterA solution of gum arabic in water, sold by druggists and confectioners as a thickener and glaze. Gum arabic is still available as a powder, but for whipped cream it is redundant today.
- A gill is half a cupHalf a cup of brandy into a pint of cream is enough liquid to slacken the froth badly. Two tablespoons of spirit, whipped in at the very end, is the practical limit; more than that and the cream will not hold.
- Liquid extract of coffeeA concentrated coffee essence of the period, often sweetened, closer to today's coffee syrup than to brewed coffee. Strong espresso reduced to a syrup, or a spoonful of instant coffee dissolved in a little cream, gives the flavor without the water.
- Sugar and flavoring lastCorrect, and worth following. Alcohol and acidic flavorings added early interfere with the fat network; sugar added at the start slows the whipping. Fold them in once the froth has formed.
- The sieve trickSkimming froth onto a hair or silk sieve and returning the drained cream was necessary with thin, hand-skimmed cream. With modern 36 percent cream almost nothing drains, so whip the whole pint at once and let the sieve go.
- Yield and holdingOne pint of cream whips to roughly a quart of froth, enough for eight to ten desserts. It holds two or three hours refrigerated; re-whisk lightly if liquid pools at the bottom of the dish.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his enormous compendium in 1896, and pages like this one are less recipes than kitchen standards written down for staff and for the ambitious home cook copying hotel service. The detail about skimming cream that has stood a day or two is the giveaway that this belongs to the era before mechanical separators and pasteurization were universal in city dairies: cream rose slowly, was lifted off by hand, and arrived at the kitchen slightly ripened. Whipped cream itself is much older than the Waldorf; sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European cookery describes "snow" beaten from cream, sometimes with bundled twigs or rushes. The brandy, curaçao and coffee variants show the hotel habit of building a whole dessert list from one base preparation, flavored to order at the last minute.