Cream

Preparation

1. Need some, have none

   Step 1

   If you need sweet cream and have sour, baking soda sweetens sour cream. So add a pinch of soda to some sour cream and keep adding more, slowly, until the cream reaches the desired degree of sweetness. Start with a tiny, tiny pinch. A teaspoon per pint is the most you’d ever want to add, and rarely that much.

   Step 2

   Or you can use powdered milk made with less water than usual, or by adding milk to the powder instead of water.

   Step 3

   But why aren’t you using your emergency can of evaporated milk? Just thought you might need a reminder—you did set those emergency supplies aside, didn’t you? For whipped cream, refrigerate both the milk and your beaters and then whip. Add sugar as desired. A word of warning, though: this works best served on cold desserts. If you put your nicely whipped evaporated milk on, say, a slice of warm pie, it will rapidly revert to its liquid state. You can also just slightly dilute the milk as a substitute for cream.

2. Sour

   Step 4

   Bet you can guess if you’ve read the rest of the section: a pinch of baking soda will sweeten sour cream.