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Pineapple Bavarian Cream
One pint of fresh or canned pineapple, one cup of sugar, one pint of cream, half a package of gelatine, half a cup of cold water. Soak gelatine until thoroughly dissolved. After chopping the pineapple fine, put in a kettle with the sugar, and simmer twenty minutes. Add the gelatine and strain at once into a pan. Rub the pineapple through the sieve. Beat it until thick enough, then the cream may be added, well whipped to a stiff froth. After mixing it thoroughly pour into a wet mould, place in a very cold place to become hard. Serve with whipped cream. [212]
A gelatin-set fruit mousse of the type that filled the "fancy dishes" chapter of every turn-of-the-century American cookbook. The method is sound, but the gelatin measurement and the setting stage both need translating.
- The hinge: cook the pineappleFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that destroys gelatin and leaves the cream a soupy mess. The twenty-minute simmer here is what denatures it. Never shortcut that step, and never fold in raw pineapple at the end.
- Half a package of gelatineBoxes of the period held about one ounce of granulated gelatin, so half a package is roughly 1/2 oz, or two modern 1/4-oz envelopes (about 4 1/2 teaspoons). That is a firm, moulded set; one and a half envelopes gives a softer spoonable cream.
- Soaking"Soak until thoroughly dissolved" means bloom it in the half cup of cold water for five to ten minutes until swollen and translucent. It dissolves properly only when stirred into the hot pineapple.
- KettleA kettle here is a saucepan, not a teakettle. Use something wide enough that a pint of chopped fruit and a cup of sugar can reduce without scorching; stir near the end, as the sugar concentration climbs.
- SugarA full cup suits sharp fresh fruit. Canned pineapple packed in syrup is already sweet, and half to two-thirds of a cup is plenty.
- "Beat it until thick enough"The purée must be chilled to the consistency of raw egg white before the cream goes in, or the whipped cream deflates and the mixture separates into a jelly layer and a foam layer. Set the pan in a bowl of ice water and whisk until it mounds slightly on the whisk.
- CreamA pint of heavy cream, whipped to soft-to-firm peaks, then folded in rather than beaten in. "Mixing it thoroughly" should be read as folding until no streaks remain, not stirring the air out.
- Moulding and chillingRinse the mould with cold water and do not dry it; that is what lets the cream slip out. "A very cold place" is the refrigerator, four to six hours or overnight. Unmould by dipping the form in warm water for a few seconds.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half of finished cream, serving eight to ten.
Bavarian cream is the English name for the French bavarois, a moulded cold dessert generally traced to the early nineteenth-century haute cuisine kitchen, where it was built on a cooked custard set with isinglass or calf's-foot jelly. The version here is thoroughly Americanised: no custard, no eggs, just fruit purée, whipped cream and commercial granulated gelatin, which was being sold in convenient small boxes by the end of the nineteenth century and put moulded desserts within reach of households with no pastry cook and no time to boil down calves' feet. The pineapple is equally a marker of its moment: the recipe's casual 'fresh or canned' reflects a period when canned pineapple had become cheap and reliable enough that a cook in a landlocked town could make a tropical dessert in February.