On Food and Cooking

Whipped Cream The miraculous thing about
whipped cream is that simple physical
agitation can transform a luscious but
unmanageable liquid into an equally luscious
but shapeable “solid.” Like foamed milk,
whipped cream is an intimate intermingling of
liquid and air, with the air divided into tiny
bubbles and the cream spread out and
immobilized in the microscopically thin
bubble walls. Common as it is today, this
luxurious, velvety foam was very laborious to
make until 1900. Before then, cooks whipped
naturally separated cream for an hour or more,
periodically skimming off the foam and
setting it aside to drain. The key to a stable
foam of the whole mass of cream is enough
fat globules to hold all the fluid and air
together, and naturally separated cream
seldom reaches that fat concentration, which
is about 30%. It took the invention of the
centrifugal separator to produce easily
whipped cream.