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Ginger Cream
1/4 box gelatine or 1 tablespoon granulated gelatine 1/4 cup cold water 1 cup milk Yolks 2 eggs 1/4 cup sugar Few grains salt 1 tablespoon wine 1/2 tablespoon brandy 2 tablespoons ginger syrup 1/4 cup Canton ginger, cut in pieces Whip from 2 1/2 cups cream Soak gelatine, and add to custard made of milk, eggs, sugar, and salt. Strain, chill in pan of ice-water, add flavorings, and when it begins to thicken fold in whip from cream.
This is a ginger Bavarian cream: a thin stirred custard set with gelatine and lightened with whipped cream. The whole thing turns on the temperature of the custard at two moments, once on the stove and once in the ice bath.
- The gelatine measureThe recipe treats 1/4 box and 1 tablespoon of granulated gelatine as the same quantity; a modern envelope of about 2 1/4 teaspoons is close enough, and gives a cream that is just set and still spoonable, which is what you want.
- Canton gingerPreserved stem ginger in heavy syrup, sold in stoneware jars and named for the port it shipped from. Any jar of stem ginger in syrup works, and the two tablespoons of ginger syrup come straight from it. Crystallised ginger is not a substitute without adding sugar syrup of its own.
- Cooking the custardMilk, yolks, sugar and salt go together over low heat or a double boiler and come to 170-180F, thick enough to coat a spoon. Past about 185F the yolks curdle and no amount of straining will make it smooth again.
- Soak the gelatine firstThe quarter cup of cold water is a bloom, not an ingredient to be added dry. Five minutes in cold water, then stir it into the hot strained custard so it dissolves completely.
- "Whip from 2 1/2 cups cream"With the unhomogenised cream of the period, a cook whipped a large quantity and skimmed the stiff froth off the top as it rose, the thinner cream beneath being whipped again or put to other uses. Modern heavy cream whips in its entirety, so roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups whipped should give a comparable volume of foam.
- The folding momentChill the custard over ice-water and watch it. Fold in the cream when it has thickened to the consistency of raw egg white; too early and the cream sinks into a layer, too late and the mixture breaks into lumps that will not smooth out.
- AlcoholThe wine is most likely a fortified one, sherry or Madeira, though the recipe says only "wine." Both it and the brandy go in after the custard is off the heat and chilling, as the recipe directs.
- Setting and yieldTurn into a wetted mould or individual cups and chill until firm, several hours. It makes upwards of a quart.
Bavarian cream, the Anglo-American descendant of the French bavarois, was a fixture of the late-nineteenth-century cookery-school repertoire: a custard base, a measured quantity of gelatine, and whipped cream folded in at a precisely judged moment. It suited household books of this kind because the method was fixed and the flavouring interchangeable, so one lesson yielded a dozen desserts. The ginger version depended on imported preserved stem ginger, packed in syrup and shipped from Canton, which reached American grocers in decorated ceramic jars. The instruction to take the "whip from" a large measure of cream reflects dairying before homogenisation, when the froth that rose first held its shape best and the cream beneath was put to other uses.