Yes, it seems like an insane amount of butter and heavy cream. Maybe butter in those days wasn't 80% fat and heavy cream wasn't 40%? Also, and it was covered by other commenters, but that amount of nutmeg, wow.
I believe 'sweet cream' just means not sour cream. Similarly I imagine 'sweet butter' simply means unsalted.
'Heavy cream' I think is a mistranslation in the reformulated recipe, that's a modern American higher fat (a bit less than double cream, but roughly substitutable) cream; I expect at that time it was a cruder process & product, more literally creamed off raw milk, resulting in something unhomogenised probably on the milky side of single cream. Which would make sense, since it's typically milk one makes pancakes with anyway, not any sort of standardised modern cream.
> Also, and it was covered by other commenters, but that amount of nutmeg, wow.
I don't follow you there though, I think that description ('exceptional, expensive amount') in OP meant for Locke at the time. These days it's (probably top-25 percentile of spices but) relatively cheap, half a nutmeg for 10 pancakes doesn't seem remarkably excessive to me? I mean, assuming it's 'nutmeg and orange blossom pancakes' that you're going for anyway.
I'm also noticing a lot of "heavy whipping creams" in my part of the US come with a thickening agent like xanthan gum in them to make them whip into whipped cream quicker. So there might be significant differences there.
Interesting. In the UK we have 'whipping cream' & 'double cream'; the former is actually closer to US 'heavy cream' (we don't have something named as such) at almost 40% fat (double would be about 50%) but even that doesn't contain such things, despite being named specifically for the purpose I mean. I think the purpose is probably stabilisation post-whipping though, rather than to whip faster?
I guess I'll have to try it. Apparently 1 nutmeg yields about 2-3 tsp ground nutmeg, and modern nutmeg pancake recipes seem to use about as much as Locke's recipe does.
The only thing I add nutmeg to on a regular basis is mashed potatoes, and then it's just a few swipes of the grater -- can't be more than 1/3 tsp -- for a family-sized portion, and the aroma is still very distinct. A single nut lasts me year or so.
I think based on some inexpert googling that what Locke calls "sweet cream" is what a British person today would call "single cream" (or just "cream"). Based on comparing fat content (about 18%) this is roughly between what Americans seem to call "half-and-half" and "light-cream".
On the other hand the butter content in this recipe is bonkers. The only way that makes sense to me is if you lose a lot of butter in the process of clarifying it, which is a step in the original recipe which isn't mentioned in the translated version in the article.
I don't know how wealthy Locke was, but people generally ate less back then cause food was less readily available. Meat was more of a special occasion rather than everyday staple like it is for a lot of Europeans today.
