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Strawberries and Cream
Pick off the stems very carefully and thoroughly wash a quart fresh strawberries; carefully drain on a sieve, place in a fruit compotier and serve with thick cream and powdered sugar separately.
There is almost nothing to this beyond judgment, so the small decisions carry the whole dish. The order of operations matters more than anything else here.
- Wash before hullingThe instruction to remove stems first is one to reverse. A hulled berry takes on water at the cut and turns soft and dilute; rinse whole, drain, then pull the hulls.
- A quart of strawberriesBy volume this is about 1.5 lb (700 g) of whole berries, or roughly four generous servings. The original gives no yield.
- CompotierA footed glass or porcelain dish for fruit, not a cooking vessel. Any shallow wide bowl does the same work, and shallow is the point: berries piled deep crush themselves.
- "Powdered sugar"In this period the term meant granulated sugar ground fine, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar than to modern confectioners' sugar, which carries added cornstarch and turns cloudy on the fruit.
- "Thick cream"Heavy or double cream, unwhipped and poured. Cream sold as "whipping cream" is lighter, generally around 30 to 35 percent fat; a heavy cream of 36 percent or more, or clotted cream, comes closer to what is likely meant.
- Serving separatelySugar and cream go to the table in their own dishes so each eater sweetens at the last moment. Sugaring the bowl in advance draws out juice and gives you macerated fruit, which is a different dish.
- Dry the berriesA sieve alone leaves water clinging in the seed pits, which slackens the cream. Spread them on a towel for a few minutes before they go into the dish.
Strawberries with cream is less a recipe than an English habit of long standing, and it appears in a book called The International Cook Book. The pairing is traditionally traced to Cardinal Wolsey's household at Hampton Court in the early sixteenth century, though that attribution is repeated far more often than it is documented. The berry served here was itself a relative newcomer: the large garden strawberry is a hybrid of two American species that arose in Europe in the eighteenth century, and it displaced the small, intensely perfumed wild strawberries earlier cooks had to work with. Because the season was short and unpreserved, the dish belonged to a few weeks of early summer, which is also why it needed no more instruction than this.