Who invented whip cream in a can

But Lapin knew that everyday homemakers needed something a little easier to use than the clumsy, messy Fount-Wip.

His answer came when Crown Cork and Seal Co. Lapin signed up as a customer. He put good, old-fashioned, postwar real cream no more need for the vegetable oil into the new aerosol cans. Then he enlisted delivery milkmen remember them? He called the stuff Reddi-wip. Lapin was able to whip up plenty of enthusiasm for a product that appealed to America's postwar prosperity and its taste for convenience.

It used to be called "milk snow. Both translate to milk snow. A English recipe for "A Dyschefull of Snowe" is a variation on whipped cream. It includes egg whites and rosewater. You can whip it with a branch. Up 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.

He put his product in the aerosol cans under the name Reddi-wip, initiallly selling it through milkmen in St. Distribution quickly expanded throughout the United States and Canada. He also founded another company that made and sold its own valves, even producing Reddi-Shave, one of the first aerosol shaving creams. Lapin sold his part of the company in and moved on, he writes. The empire he founded grew, though, and by the end of the twentieth century one in every two cans of aerosol whip cream sold bore the iconic Reddi-wip name.

But, writes historian Heather Rogers, disposable convenience came at a hidden cost.