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Bavarian Cream
1/2 box of gelatine (not acid), 1 quart new milk, 4 eggs, 3/4 cupful sugar, flavoring extract. Soak the gelatine in a little warm water while the milk is coming to the boiling-point in a double boiler. Add the gelatine to the milk just before it boils, and stir thoroughly. Add the yolks of the eggs, which have been beaten very light, with the sugar. Mix well; take from the fire and set it to cool. When quite cool add the whites of the eggs, beaten very stiff, and the flavoring. Pour it into jelly glasses which have been rinsed in cold water, and set in the ice-box. This will make 8 glasses. It is better to make it several hours before using. When cold turn out and serve with whipped cream. Shredded fruit is frequently added.
A late nineteenth-century moulded milk custard set with gelatine, of the type served in individual glasses rather than a large mould. The method leaves the eggs undercooked, so the notes below explain the terms and then the problem.
- Why it fails todayThe stiffly beaten whites go in after the custard has cooled and are never heated at all, and the yolks meet the milk only in the moments before it reaches a boil, off direct heat. Nothing in the dish reliably reaches the 160F/71C at which Salmonella in shell eggs is killed, and the finished cream then sits for several hours as a moist, low-acid, sugary custard. Use a current recipe for Bavarian cream, one that cooks the custard base to temperature and uses pasteurised whites or none at all.
- Half a box of gelatineGelatine boxes of the period were not standardised, and their contents were subdivided differently from today's quarter-ounce envelopes. The quantity here is genuinely ambiguous and cannot be converted with confidence.
- "Not acid"Some packaged gelatines of the period were sold with a separate paper of acid, meant for lemon jellies. The instruction appears to call for plain gelatine, the equivalent of the plain unflavoured gelatine sold today.
- New milkFresh whole milk, straight from the day's milking and unskimmed. Whole milk is the modern equivalent; the recipe depends on the fat for body.
- Jelly glassesSmall straight-sided tumblers of roughly six to eight ounces, the same glasses used for putting up preserves. Rinsing them in cold water was to help the set turn out cleanly.
- Flavouring extractVanilla was the default, with almond, lemon and rose all common. Extracts are added after the mixture cools because heat drives off the aromatics.
- YieldEight glasses, as stated, from a quart of milk — small portions by modern standards, and intended as one course of several.
Bavarian cream, crème bavaroise, is a custard lightened with air and set with gelatine; the name is generally traced to French professional kitchens of the early nineteenth century rather than to Bavaria itself, and no convincing Bavarian original has ever been identified. Versions appear in American household manuals through the second half of the nineteenth century, and commercially packaged gelatine spared the cook the long labour of boiling calves' feet or clarifying isinglass, putting moulded creams within reach of a cook without a staff. This version is a thrifty one: a quart of milk and four eggs, no cream in the body at all, with whipped cream saved for the top and "shredded fruit" offered as an optional extra. The instruction to set it in the ice-box places it firmly in the era of the domestic icebox and delivered block ice, when a chilled dessert still carried some ceremony.