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Rice Bavarian Cream
Soak a tablespoonful of granulated gelatin in half a cup of cold water, dissolve over hot water, add quarter of a cup of sugar, quarter of a teaspoonful of salt and a teaspoonful of vanilla. Now stir in a cup of cooked rice, heated. Mix well, until cool, and then add a cup of cream, whipped stiff. Turn into a mold to stiffen. Serve with foamy sauce on page 115.
A gelatin dessert built on leftover rice, with no custard base to fuss over. Everything depends on timing the two temperatures correctly.
- The hinge: cool, don't chillThe rice-gelatin mixture must be cooled to the point where it just begins to thicken — the consistency of raw egg white — before the whipped cream goes in. Fold it in while the base is warm and the cream deflates into liquid; wait too long and the base sets in lumps that will not fold smooth.
- Gelatin quantityA tablespoon of granulated gelatin is roughly one modern envelope (1/4 oz, 7 g), though an envelope measures nearer 2 1/4 teaspoons. Soften it in the half cup of cold water for five minutes until spongy, then melt it over hot, not boiling, water.
- The ricePlain boiled or steamed white rice, cooked soft and unseasoned — not rice pudding, and not a firm pilaf. Heating it before it meets the gelatin is not optional: cold rice chills the gelatin and sets it in strings.
- "A cup of cream"Measured before whipping. Modern heavy or whipping cream runs about 36 percent fat; a cup yields roughly two cups whipped. The recipe says "whipped stiff," but stopping at soft-firm peaks makes the folding easier.
- The mold and unmoldingA one-quart mold is right. Rinse it in cold water before filling and the cream will release more willingly; to turn out, dip the mold to its rim in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a chilled plate.
- Setting timeThe original gives none. Allow at least four hours in the refrigerator, and overnight is better for a mold with detail in it.
- YieldAbout a quart, serving six.
- The foamy sauceThe classic accompaniment is creamed butter and sugar beaten with egg and whisked over hot water until thick. If the version you use leaves the egg barely warmed, use pasteurized eggs.
Bavarian cream is the English name for the French bavarois, a cold sweet of custard set with gelatin and lightened with whipped cream, which appears in French cookery well before the nineteenth century and is often said to have reached American home cooks through the gelatin manufacturers' pamphlets of the early twentieth, though that channel is plausible rather than documented. Its connection to Bavaria is traditional rather than documented; the usual explanation is that a French chef devised it in the service of a Bavarian household, and the story is repeated more often than it is evidenced. This version is a plain-kitchen descendant: no custard, no eggs, no stirring over a double boiler, just a package of gelatin, whipped cream, and a cup of rice left from another meal. Cold molded desserts of this kind flourished in the icebox era, and the use of cooked rice as bulk is characteristic of a period when a dish was expected to look like a company dessert while spending almost nothing.