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Cherry Bavarian Cream
Use the foundation recipe given in Introductory Recipes, adding two tablespoons Kirschwasser or Maraschino and three-fourths cup of chopped, candied cherries.
This is a variation, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's foundation Bavarian cream in front of you. What follows covers the additions and the points where a classic bavarois goes wrong.
- The foundation recipeA Bavarian cream of this period is a stirred custard (milk, egg yolks, sugar) set with gelatin and lightened with whipped cream, chilled in a mold. Typical proportions are 2 cups milk, 4-6 yolks, 1/2 cup sugar, about 1 tablespoon powdered gelatin and 1 cup cream. Without the base recipe in hand, the additions here have nothing to attach to.
- Gelatin has changedTurn-of-the-century books often call for sheet gelatin or a whole box of granulated. One envelope of modern granulated gelatin is 1/4 oz, about 2 1/2 teaspoons, and sets roughly 2 cups of liquid to unmolding firmness. Older recipes frequently used more, giving a bouncier cream than most people want now.
- Kirschwasser and maraschino are not interchangeable in sweetnessKirsch is a dry, unsweetened cherry eau-de-vie; maraschino liqueur is sweet and made from marasca cherries, pits included, which is where its almond note comes from. If you use maraschino, cut the sugar in the custard slightly.
- Add the liquor coldStir the two tablespoons into the custard after it has cooled and started to thicken, not into the hot custard, since alcohol added while hot carries off much of the aroma.
- Candied cherries, not cocktail cherriesThe three-fourths cup called for means glacé cherries, firm and sugar-saturated. Modern bright red maraschino cocktail cherries are wet, will bleed pink through the cream and will not hold their shape. If your candied cherries are sticky, toss them in a little of the recipe's sugar before folding in.
- When to fold in the fruitFold the chopped cherries in when the custard has thickened to the consistency of unbeaten egg white, at the same stage as the whipped cream. Added earlier they sink to what will become the top of the turned-out mold.
- Custard temperatureCook the base to 170-175F, thick enough to coat a spoon. Above about 180F the yolks curdle, and no amount of straining fully recovers the texture.
- Chilling and yieldAllow at least four hours in the mold, better overnight. A batch on the proportions above fills a 1 1/2-quart mold and serves six to eight. To unmold, dip the mold in warm water for five to ten seconds only.
Bavarian cream, bavarois in French, belongs to the grand repertoire of nineteenth-century pastry work rather than to Bavaria in any direct way; the name's origin is disputed and usually explained as an association with Bavarian nobility employed by French chefs, which is tradition rather than documented fact. It is generally credited with reaching its standard form in the nineteenth-century French repertoire, where it became a reliable dinner-party sweet, endlessly varied by flavoring a single foundation custard: coffee, chocolate, strawberry, cherry. The two flavorings named here were both widely available -- kirschwasser, the clear cherry brandy of the Black Forest and Alsace, and maraschino, distilled from the marasca cherries of the Dalmatian coast near Zadar and fashionable in Europe and America through the nineteenth century. Candied cherries filled the same role: preserved fruit that let a cook put cherries on the table in any season.