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Cherries in Cream
Thoroughly wash, drain, pick off the stems and stone a quart of fine fresh sweet cherries. Dress them on a compotier and serve with double cream and powdered sugar separately.
Barely a recipe and all the better for it: the whole thing rests on the fruit, so buy cherries at their peak and serve them cold. A few of the terms need translating.
- A quart of cherriesMeasured by volume, not weight — about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of whole sweet cherries, roughly 600–700 g. That is four modest servings.
- CompotierA footed glass or porcelain dish for fruit, wider and shallower than a bowl. Any shallow serving bowl works.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period this means sugar ground fine, which corresponds to today's superfine or caster sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will turn cloudy and pasty in cream — avoid it here.
- Double creamBritish double cream runs about 48% butterfat. The closest American equivalent is heavy cream at 36–40%; use the highest-fat, least-processed cream you can find, and do not whip it.
- StoningA hand pitter is fastest, but the cherries will leak juice once opened. Pit them shortly before serving and keep them chilled so they stay firm rather than slumping in their own syrup.
- Served separatelyThe instruction is deliberate. Cream and sugar go to the table in their own vessels so each person dresses their own portion; combined in advance, the sugar draws juice from the fruit and thins the cream.
- Sour cherriesThe recipe specifies sweet cherries — Bing, Rainier, Lapins. Sour varieties such as Montmorency are very tart raw and are generally used cooked.
Fruit served plain with cream and sugar handed round separately is a long-standing pattern in European dessert cookery, and it survives in the English strawberries-and-cream and the French fraises à la crème. The compotier, a stemmed fruit dish, was common equipment on a well-set nineteenth-century table, where fresh fruit often closed the meal. Cherries in particular had a short, intense season before refrigerated transport, which is why a book like this treats them so simply: with fruit at its best, the cook's only job was to wash, pit and get out of the way.