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Raspberries with Cream
Carefully pick out all stems, if any adhering, from a quart of fresh raspberries. Place berries in a compotier and serve with powdered sugar and cream separately.
Barely a recipe at all, but the assumptions behind it are dated enough to be worth spelling out.
- CompotierA footed glass or porcelain bowl for fruit, standard on a period sideboard. Any shallow serving bowl works; depth is the enemy, since berries at the bottom of a deep dish crush under their own weight.
- "Powdered sugar"In books of this era this usually means finely ground granulated sugar — what is now sold as caster or superfine sugar — not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and turns pasty on wet fruit.
- CreamThe cream intended is unwhipped and pourable. Butterfat was not standardised in this period, so the closest modern stand-in is a pouring cream of moderate to high fat; plain pasteurized tastes closer to it than ultra-pasteurized, which is flatter.
- WashingThe instruction is only to pick over the berries; no rinsing is mentioned. Raspberries absorb water and collapse, so if they must be rinsed, do it briefly in cold water just before serving and drain on a towel.
- Serving separatelySugar and cream go to the table in their own vessels so each person dresses their own portion. Sugared raspberries begin weeping within minutes, so anything mixed in advance arrives as soup.
- YieldA quart of raspberries runs roughly 1 to 1.5 lb depending on how loosely they are packed, and serves four generously, six modestly.
Fruit with sugar and cream needs no invention. The compotier itself belongs to the French service vocabulary that runs through such collections — the same impulse that gives a bowl of berries a printed recipe at all.