The Bottom Line: Sweet facts about whipped cream!
The Full Story:
- Whipped cream is often sweetened and sometimes flavored with vanilla, and is often called Chantilly cream or crème Chantill.
- Cream must be below 50-degrees to whip, at 50 or above it churns into butter rather than whips. Unpasteurized, unhomogenized cream whips much easier then pasteurized or pasteurized & homogenized cream.
- Whipped cream has been around since the 16th century. It was included in recipes that date back to 1549 in Italy and 1604 in France.
- First called whipped cream in 1673, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, there is a record of crème fouettée—“whipped cream” in French—in a recipe book from 1629.
- In very old texts, whipped was referred to as neige de lait in French and neve di latte in Italian. Both translate to milk snow. A 1545 English recipe for "A Dyschefull of Snowe" is a variation on whipped cream. It includes egg whites and rosewater.
- Until the 19th century, recipes for whipped cream called for whipping the cream with a willow or rush branch in place of the modern whisk.
- The world record for the tallest dollop of whipped cream on a mug of hot chocolate is 7 1/4 inches set by Melissa Arkin and Casey McLaughlin in 2011.
- Imitations of whipped cream are often sold under the name “whipped topping” (you know, like Cool Whip?). Whipped topping normally contains some mixture of partially hydrogenated oil, sweeteners, water, and stabilizers and emulsifiers added to prevent syneresis, similar to margarine instead of the butter fat in the cream used in whipped cream.