Whipped Cream, No Other Delights

Today in Tedium: Let me ask you a question that you probably haven’t considered in the same way that you might have the ol’ is-a-hot-dog-a-sandwich debate. Is Cool Whip ice cream? After all, you buy it frozen. It is creamy, and these days, it includes milk. It is used in many of the same ways as ice cream, on existing desserts and with beverages. You can eat it in a bowl, and when it’s frozen, it kind of looks like ice cream. (Despite this, when I asked folks on Twitter whether they considered Cool Whip ice cream, most said no—with a minority of just 17 percent of respondents conceding that it kind of worked that way when it was frozen.) It struck me recently that whipped cream is a fascinating topic to dive into because it’s so prevalent in artificial form, even though the real thing is pretty easily accessible. Why is that? Today’s Tedium talks about food tech’s influence on whipped cream. — Ernie @ Tedium

Today’s GIF is from the best movie about a white substance that people can’t stop eating, The Stuff.

I specifically tell you to use a hand mixer in this, but I want to see if I can confuse the search algorithm by using an image of an electric mixer. Take that, search overlords! (Sorin Gheorghita/Unsplash)

Let’s put a whipped cream recipe in here, just to see what happens

Whipped cream is a key ingredient of an array of modern sweets—the topper to your Frappuccino, to name one—and traditionally, it’s had a reputation of being a somewhat temperamental concoction to make. After all, as the name implies, you have to whip it. But not for too long, lest it becomes crumbly. And not to soft, unless you’d like your cream to lose its shape almost immediately.

And not just with any cream. It has to be the heavy-duty stuff, with high butterfat content. Tedium isn’t a recipe site, but just to ensure that a search engine sees this article, we’re going to sarcastically include a recipe within this piece:

• 1 cup cold heavy whipping cream
• 1 to 2 tablespoons powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

As with any recipe, it comes with instructions. Here’s ours: Chill the bowl in which you’re stirring, possibly using a bag of frozen vegetables. Use a hand whisk, rather than an electric mixer, because it gives you more control and because you can check it off as a modern form of exercise.

Start mixing in the cream, stirring slowly. Think hard about the things you’ve done in your life as you stir. As more of the heavy whipping cream goes into the bowl, gradually speed up, knowing that this is something you must get right, because everything else has been a failure up to this point. Consider working on your next novel.

But before you get to writing, continue to stir. Eventually, as the whipped cream starts fluffing up, add some powdered sugar to help sweeten it. Continue stirring. Embrace the fact that your thoughts may seem derivative of other thinkers, but if you just keep thinking, you might come up with an original thought of your own.

Then, right around the time that the cream is at or near the level of consistency you’d like, add some vanilla extract and stir it in. That’s right, adding outside flavor to a project you work on is OK, but don’t add too much, because that’s plagiarism.

Once you have the cream at a spot you’d like it, where the air bubbles have permeated it almost perfectly, stop stirring. Feel free to serve or store.

You are now ready to write the next great American novel. Don’t forget to outline the characters.

It may not look like it, but the innovation that led to this automobile directly led to the creation of artificial alternatives to whipped cream.

If whipped cream is so easy to make, why are there so many ready-made alternatives? Blame World War II and Henry Ford

So, as you might have deduced from the above recipe, whipped cream is not exactly rocket science to concoct. It is literally someone stirring for a few minutes with a small number of important ingredients, all of which can be easily acquired from a grocery store. As long as you can work in the right amount of air, you’re golden.

If that’s all we need, why did 129 million Americans eat Cool Whip, an artificial equivalent that was originally dairy-free, in 2020?

In some ways, the emergence of whipped cream as a fixation of food tech is really the story of how World War II created an opening for new types of dairy-free alternatives.

But plenty of people were willing to put up with this song and dance for the opportunity to create whipped cream. That wasn’t necessarily the problem that led to artificial equivalents to dominate the market. No, that was World War II.

The war led to heavy rationing of an array of products, among them dairy, with a key figure in this discussion being auto magnate Henry Ford. As I’ve written in the past, the rise of meat analogues has a history closely tied to the state of Michigan, and that is true for dairy analogues as well, as the website SoyInfo Center, perhaps the most exhaustive website on a single plant on the entire internet, explains:

In 1929, when the Great Depression hit America—and especially American farmers—Ford set out to develop new ways to help farmers out of the hard times. In that year, he built a large laboratory in Greenfield Village, which was part of the Edison Institute of Technology in Dearborn, Michigan. Thomas Edison (then over 80 years old and Ford’s greatest hero, after whom the Institute had been named) was a frequent visitor and consultant. At the laboratory Ford and his researchers began experiments to find a farm crop that could be grown in Michigan and that showed promise for use in industry and as a food. In December 1931, after extensive tests on virtually every farm crop known, the soybean was chosen as the most hopeful contender, since it was rich in both oil and protein, had a residual fiber amenable to many uses, was low in water, and stored well. One day at about this time, according to Bob Smith, one-time manager of the Ford farms, Mr. Ford wandered into the laboratory and picked up a copy of The Soybean by C.V. Piper and W.J. Morse (1923); he sat down and read it from cover to cover. When he finished he encouraged his researchers to go ahead at full speed, concentrating their efforts on soy. In keeping with his policy of producing raw materials as near as possible to the point of processing, Ford was soon encouraging farmers in southern Michigan to plant plenty of soybean, with the assurance that the Ford Motor Company would do everything possible to provide a market for them.

Ford tried a lot of use cases for soy, including as an additive to automotive paint, which proved an essential use case almost immediately, as well as a source of plastic. He at one point attempted to make a car made out of soybeans. It was a miracle bean for which he saw no end to its uses.

But perhaps Ford’s most influential efforts to find a market for soy came when he attempted to encourage an alternative to dairy. In 1934, Ford attempted to open a soy milk factory, and was know during this period to serve guests entire meals with ingredients that included or were entirely made of soy.

He wasn’t alone—as Serious Eats notes, Seventh-Day Adventist doctor Harry W. Miller also began developing soy milk for the Chinese market around this time, which turned out to be a bad idea because, you know, World War II.

But what proved to be bad timing for Miller turned out to be smart timing for Ford, as the war created a rationing need in the United States, affecting many foods, including dairy. Fortunately there were plenty of soybeans!

As Nadia Berenstein of Serious Eats aptly put it: “One way of understanding soy milk is as a product one turns to when dairy is unobtainable or off-limits—a kind of milk of last resort.”

“What is Delsoy?” sounds like a question that I ask myself all the time. (The Daily Times/via Newspapers.com)

This helped give soy some extra attention and momentum in the market, which finally gets us to the part where we can talk about whipped cream again. Whipped cream is an excellent example of a product that benefits from non-dairy equivalents, and because of all this investment in soy products during the 1930s and 1940s, there was a lot of momentum to find ways to sell soy to consumers. Enter Delsoy, a product first sold in 1944 by former Ford researcher Bob Smith along with business partner Herbert Marshall Taylor.

And Delsoy wasn’t alone in being inspired by Henry Ford’s efforts in a direction that led to the creation of whipped topping. As Soyinfo Center explains, Bob Rich—a soy entrepreneur who developed the first soy-based ice cream and coffee creamer—got his start by attempting to create a soy whipped cream of his own:

After resigning from in Oct. 1944, Rich returned to Buffalo and engaged chemists to help him transform his “soy whipping cream” idea into reality. For several months Rich and Dr. Alexander Schwarcman (vice president and research director of Spencer Kellogg & Sons, from whom Rich purchased shortening) did intense work, testing every known type of emulsifier. Eventually they found that only one (propylene glycol monostearate), supplied by only one company, would do the job. This was the final step in developing a commercially acceptable soy whipping cream.

With the product ready to go into large scale production, Rich wrote the general consul of the Ford Motor Co. requesting rights to its patented method of continuous protein extraction—a request he had been led to believe in 1944 would be granted as a matter of routine. No response. When Rich went to talk with Ford’s in-house counsel, he backed off on the company’s offer saying, “Don’t you realize that we’re selling lots of Fordson tractors to American farmers who raise cows?” Rich’s rebuttal that Ford was also selling lots of tractors to American soybean farmers didn’t work.

So Rich went back to Buffalo and, with the help of one of the nation’s leading dairy engineers, developed a batch protein extraction process, which eventually extracted a significantly higher percentage of isolated soy protein from soy flakes—which Rich obtained from the Glidden Co.

While Delsoy eventually failed in the market, Rich’s product, called Rich’s Whip Topping, proved to have a number of advantages to regular whipped topping, including the fact that it maintained its structural advantages, was cheaper, was more shelf-stable, and could be re-whipped. In other words, unlike most other soy-based products, it was objectively better than the actual product in many ways. In fact, you can still buy it today—though it long ago changed its primary oils to palm and coconut oil, which were believed to taste better.

It was the first shot of many in an era of whipped cream innovation during the mid-20th century.