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Bananas, Bavaroise Of
Boil up a quart of milk, add two ounces of sugar, wet two ounces of cornflour with a little cold milk, and stir into the boiling milk. Stir over the fire until it thickens, and add the yolks of two eggs, and half a tea-spoonful of vanilla essence. Let the eggs bind, and set aside to cool. Peel two bananas, and cut into thin slices, mix with the above, and fill into one or two wetted moulds. When quite cold, immerse the moulds in tepid water, turn out on a dish, and serve with a cold fruit syrup. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A cornflour-set moulded cream rather than a true Bavarian cream — there is no gelatine and no whipped cream here, so the set comes entirely from the starch and the yolks. That changes how you handle it.
- Quart and ouncesAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 1.1 litres; a US quart of 32 fl oz will give a firmer result with the same 2 oz (55 g) of cornflour. Two ounces of sugar is a scant third of a cup.
- CornflourBritish cornflour is American cornstarch, not fine-milled maize flour. Slaking it in cold milk before it meets the hot milk is what prevents lumps, exactly as written.
- The hinge: let the eggs bindOnce the yolks go in, the mixture must be held below a simmer. Starch protects yolks from curdling to a degree, but a rolling boil after the eggs will thin the set and can leave a grainy, eggy texture. Two to three minutes of gentle stirring is enough to cook them through.
- When to add the bananasFold the slices in only once the cream has cooled to lukewarm. Stirred into hot custard they collapse to mush, and the cut faces darken quickly — a squeeze of lemon over the slices keeps them pale.
- Wetted mouldsRinsing the mould in cold water and leaving it wet is the period substitute for oiling; the film of water stops the cream gripping. It works, but a very light film of neutral oil is more reliable in a modern fluted mould.
- Turning outTepid water means barely warm — a few seconds' immersion to the rim, no more. Too warm or too long and the outer layer melts and the shape slumps.
- Setting timeGive it at least four hours in the refrigerator, or overnight. A starch-set cream firms up more slowly than a gelatine one and will not survive unmoulding if it is only cool rather than cold.
- Yield and servingRoughly six to eight servings from a quart. The cold fruit syrup is not optional decoration — the cream itself is only lightly sweetened, and a sharp raspberry or apricot syrup carries it.
- Probable costOne shilling and sixpence. Cassell's appends a 'probable cost' to its entries throughout, as a budgeting guide for households. It is a single total, with no breakdown of which ingredient carried the cost.
Bavaroise originally meant something quite different from a moulded cream: in eighteenth-century France it was a hot drink of milk, tea and capillaire or sugar syrup, generally said to have been named for Bavarian visitors to a Paris café. By the nineteenth century the word had migrated to the cold moulded custard we now call a bavarois, usually set with isinglass or gelatine and lightened with whipped cream. Cassell's version here takes the shape and the name but reaches the set with cornflour and yolks alone — cheaper, more forgiving, and typical of a dictionary aimed at middle-class households rather than professional kitchens. The bananas are the telling detail: they remained a costly novelty in Britain through the 1870s and 1880s, and they turn up in cookery books of the period as a fashionable rarity to be sliced into creams, fritters and jellies.