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Bohemian Cream
Take four ounces of any kind of fruit, stone it, and sweeten. Pass it through a sieve, adding one ounce and a half of melted or dissolved isinglass to each half pint of fruit. Mix well, then whip a pint of rich cream, and add the isinglass and fruit gradually to it. Pour all into a mould, set it on ice or where it is very cool, and when set, dip the mould a moment into water, and then turn it out ready for the table.
A cold moulded fruit cream, essentially a Bavarian without the custard base. Everything depends on the setting agent, which is the one ingredient you will not be using.
- Isinglass to gelatinIsinglass is dried fish swim bladder, and its setting strength varied enormously by grade — the ounce and a half per half pint of fruit called for here is not a weight you can transfer to modern gelatin. Set by the liquid instead: reckon on about 1 envelope (a scant ¼ oz) of powdered gelatin, or 4 sheets, per 2 cups of liquid, which for the cup of purée and pint of cream here means roughly 1½ envelopes.
- Temperature is the hingeBloom the gelatin, dissolve it over gentle heat, then let it cool to just barely warm before it goes near the cream. Poured in hot it deflates the whip; poured in too cool it seizes into rubbery threads through the mixture.
- Add gradually, and to the creamThe instruction to add the fruit-and-gelatin mixture to the cream in stages, rather than the reverse, is deliberate. Whisk in the first spoonfuls to temper, then fold the rest.
- Half a pint, a pintOn American measure, half a pint is 1 cup of sieved fruit and a pint of cream is 2 cups; if the source is British, the half pint is 10 fl oz and the pint 20. "Rich cream" is best read as today's heavy cream at 36% or better — lower-fat whipping cream will set but tastes thinner.
- Fruit that will not setFresh pineapple, kiwi, papaya and figs contain proteases that digest gelatin and leave a soupy mould. Use them cooked, or choose berries, apricots, cherries or plums — the recipe's instruction to stone the fruit points that way.
- Four ounces is a starting pointFour ounces of fruit yields well under the half pint of purée the proportion assumes; scale up to about a pound of fruit for a cup of sieved pulp, and sweeten the purée noticeably more than tastes right on its own, since cold and cream both mute sugar.
- Setting and unmouldingFour hours in the refrigerator, or overnight for a large mould. Dip in warm — not hot — water for a few seconds, no more, or the outer surface slumps.
- YieldAbout a quart, serving six generously in a 1-litre mould.
Bohemian cream belongs to the family of cold moulded creams — Bavarian, Russian, Neapolitan — that filled the pastry chapters of nineteenth-century books once ice was reliably available to middle-class households. The names are often taken to be commercial flourishes rather than geographical claims, and this one is simply a fruit purée lightened with whipped cream and held with a setting agent, the same formula as a fruit Bavarian minus the egg custard. Its interest lies in the isinglass: sheets and shreds of dried sturgeon swim bladder, much of it imported from Russia, one of the gelling agents available to the household before granulated gelatin was sold in convenient measured envelopes — calf's-foot jelly was another common stand-by. Commercial powdered gelatine displaced it in the kitchen within a generation or two; isinglass survives mainly as a clarifying agent in brewing. The lightly-set moulded cream stayed fashionable because it could be made in the morning, left in the cool, and turned out at the table with no last-minute work.