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Raspberry Cream
One quart good cream, one pint fresh raspberries; mash and rub the fruit through a fine sieve or strainer, to extract the seeds, bring the cream to a boil (having reserved one pint for froth), and add it to the berries while it remains hot, sweeten with powdered sugar to taste, let it become cold. Now raise cream which has been reserved to a froth with a beater, take off the froth and lay it on a sieve to drain; fill dish or glasses with the cream and place froth on top. Very nice. Any kind of berries, jam or jelly is good, and can be used without straining.
A cold pouring cream rather than a set dessert — there is no egg, gelatine or starch here, so expect the texture of a thick, drinkable custard under a cap of whipped froth. Two details do most of the work: how the hot cream meets the acidic fruit, and how the froth is drained.
- The hinge: acid and boiling creamRaspberry purée is acidic enough to curdle scalded cream if the two are combined carelessly. Add the hot cream to the fruit in a slow stream while stirring, rather than dumping the purée into the pan, and take the cream to a bare boil only — a hard rolling boil raises the risk of splitting and of a cooked, scorched flavour.
- QuantitiesOne quart of cream is 4 cups (about 950 ml), of which 1 pint (2 cups) is reserved for the froth. A pint of raspberries is roughly 12 oz / 340 g, yielding perhaps three-quarters of a cup of seedless purée once sieved.
- What "good cream" meantUnhomogenised cream skimmed from raw milk, generally richer than most cartons sold today, though the fat content of gravity-separated cream varied a good deal. Modern heavy or whipping cream (around 36 percent) is the closest supermarket equivalent; ultra-pasteurised cream is often reported to whip to a coarser, less stable froth.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term meant granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold now. Superfine (caster) sugar is the honest substitute; it dissolves in the hot cream without adding starch.
- The frothThis is the old syllabub method: whip the reserved pint, skim the risen froth off the top with a skimmer, and lay it on a fine sieve set over a bowl so the loose liquid drains away. What is left is drier and holds its shape on the surface of the cream. Whipping the whole pint stiff and spooning it on works, but sits heavier.
- Chilling"Let it become cold" means several hours in the refrigerator, ideally overnight. The mixture thickens noticeably as it chills; served warm or barely cool it will taste thin and oversweet.
- Yield and serviceEnough for six to eight small glasses. Serve in stemmed glasses or custard cups with the froth added at the last moment, and pass thin crisp biscuits alongside.
- The variationsJam or jelly needs no sieving and little added sugar beyond tasting; stir it into the hot cream and adjust. Blackberries want straining like raspberries; currants and cherries will need more sugar than you expect.
Fruit "creams" of this kind sit between the seventeenth-century English syllabub and the ice creams that were displacing them by the time The Dixie Cook Book appeared in the 1880s. The giveaway is the froth: raising cream with a whisk, skimming the risen foam and draining it on a sieve is the technique English cookery books had been printing since the eighteenth century and earlier. Its survival here, in a Southern household book aimed at kitchens without mechanical refrigeration, makes sense othing but cold storage and a few hours, while a frozen cream needed ice, a freezer pail and a good deal of arm. The closing note that "any kind of berries, jam or jelly" will serve is characteristic of the genre: a single method offered as a template to be run against whatever the garden or the preserve shelf held that week.