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Whipped Cream (Place cream over ice until)
Place cream over ice until thoroughly chilled, and whip with an egg-beater or whip-churn until it froths. While whipping place froth on a sieve, and return to bowl to be re-whipped all that passes through. When cream is difficult to whip, add to it and beat with it the white of an egg. Sweetened and flavored this is a choice dessert alone, but it may be served in various ways. Baked apples, and fresh or preserved berries are delicious with it. Jelly-glasses, one-third full of jelly and filled up with cream, make a very wholesome and delicious dessert.
The instructions assume unhomogenized cream, a hand beater, and ice rather than refrigeration. Most of the work described disappears with modern cream, but the temperature discipline still matters.
- The hinge: coldEverything must be cold — cream, bowl, and beater. Cream at 40F or below whips in two or three minutes; at room temperature the fat is too soft to trap air and it will thin out instead of thickening. Fifteen minutes with the bowl and whisk in the freezer is worth more than any technique.
- What cream to buyUse heavy cream or heavy whipping cream, at least 36 percent fat. Ordinary "light cream" or half-and-half will not whip at all. Ultra-pasteurized cream whips, but takes longer and holds less air.
- The sieve stepSkip it. It suits cream that thickens unevenly under a hand churn: froth rises before the bulk of the cream is ready, so what has whipped is lifted onto the sieve and the liquid draining through goes back for more beating. Modern cream in a stand mixer or with a hand mixer thickens as one mass.
- Whip-churnA small plunger- or dasher-worked churn of the kind sold for whipping cream and syllabub. A balloon whisk, hand mixer, or stand mixer with the whisk attachment all replace it.
- The white of an eggA fix for thin, warm, or old cream that turns up in cookbooks of the period. It is unnecessary with modern heavy cream, and the egg is never cooked — anyone avoiding raw egg should simply chill the cream harder or use a colder bowl.
- Sweetening and flavoringAbout 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar and half a teaspoon of vanilla per cup of cream. Add them once the cream has begun to thicken; sugar added at the start slows the whipping.
- When to stopSoft peaks for serving with fruit or spooning into glasses, firm peaks if it must hold shape. A few seconds past firm peaks the emulsion breaks and you have grainy cream on its way to butter.
- Yield and the jelly-glass dessertOne cup of cream gives roughly two cups whipped — enough for four. Assemble the jelly-glass version shortly before serving, as unstabilized whipped cream weeps within an hour or two.
Whipped cream long predates the mechanical beater: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English and French cooks made "snow cream" and syllabub by whisking cream with a bundle of twigs or rushes and skimming the froth off onto a sieve to drain — precisely the skim-and-drain method preserved in this recipe, two or three centuries later. That the froth is caught on a sieve at all may suggest that the technique descends from an era before homogenization, when cream was uneven and the first foam had to be rescued before the rest of the bowl caught up. The instruction to place the cream over ice points to the other change of the period, for The Dixie Cook Book appeared in the 1880s.