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Sour-Cream Filling for Cake
Sweeten and chill a cupful of sour cream. Whip it, keeping it cold while doing so, and when stiff fold in a cup of chopped nuts. This is excellent for layer cakes. If for any reason the cream does not become stiff, add one teaspoonful of melted gelatine at the last and set on the ice.
A two-ingredient filling that depends entirely on the fat content of the cream, which is the one thing a century has changed.
- "Sour cream" is not today's sour cream"Sour cream" here is not today's cultured product: it meant cream that had soured naturally over a day or two, and if it was heavy cream it stayed rich enough to whip. Commercial cultured sour cream is a leaner thing (the US standard is a minimum of 18 percent fat) and tends to thin rather than stiffen when beaten. Crème fraîche, at around 30 percent fat, is the closest substitute and whips reliably.
- The hinge: keep everything coldThe instruction to keep it cold while whipping is the whole recipe. Chill the bowl, the beater and the cream; soured cream breaks into grain and weeping whey faster than sweet cream does if it warms.
- A cupfulEight fluid ounces of cream, which whips to roughly two cups and fills two or three layers of an 8- or 9-inch cake.
- Sweeten before whippingAs the recipe directs. Powdered sugar dissolves without grit; two to three tablespoons per cup suits the tartness of the cream.
- "Melted gelatine""Melted gelatine" means gelatin already softened and warmed to liquid — the recipe wants a teaspoonful of it. Soften a little powdered gelatin in cold water, warm it just to liquid, and cool it to barely tepid before folding in: added hot it will cook streaks into the cream, added cold it sets in threads.
- "Set on the ice"The icebox, meaning refrigeration. Fill and chill the cake at least an hour before cutting, and keep it refrigerated after; this is a dairy filling with no cooking step and it will not hold at room temperature for an afternoon.
- NutsChop fine rather than coarse, or the layers slide. Walnuts, pecans or hickory nuts all suit a soured-cream base; toast them and cool them completely first.
Cream that had gone sour was not a loss but a different ingredient, valued for the lift it gave to cakes and biscuits and for a tang that sweet cream lacked. Whipped soured cream fillings turn up regularly in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The gelatin fallback at the end marks the period too: granulated gelatin was commercially available and reliable by the 1890s, and cooks could reach for it as insurance when a foam or a cream refused to hold.