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For the Bavaroise
Four ounces of Chocolate.
Three gills of Milk.
Two ounces of Castor Sugar.
One Lemon Rind (grated).
This is an ingredient list for one element of a larger sweet rather than a standalone method, so the useful work here is translating the quantities and saying what the list is missing.
- Three gills of milkIn imperial measure a gill is 5 fluid ounces, so this is 15 fl oz, roughly 425 ml. Whole milk.
- Four ounces of chocolateThis most likely means plain block chocolate with little or no added sugar, nearer modern unsweetened or a high-percentage couverture than a supermarket bar. If sweetened eating chocolate is used on top of the two ounces of sugar the mixture may come out cloying.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar. Ordinary granulated will work here because the sugar dissolves in hot milk, but it is coarser than what the author intended for anything uncooked.
- Lemon rindGrated zest only, no white pith, from an unwaxed lemon. Its purpose is to perfume the milk; scalding the milk with the zest and leaving it to infuse off the heat extracts far more than stirring it in cold.
- The list is incomplete on purposeThe list is short -- if this belongs to a moulded bavarois rather than the older bavaroise drink, nothing here will set it, and the parent recipe would have to supply egg yolks, cream and either gelatine or isinglass. Either way, treat these four items as the flavouring base only.
- Chocolate and milkMelt the chocolate into the hot milk gradually rather than dropping it into boiling liquid. Chocolate can go grainy if it is shocked, and a grainy base will stay grainy through the custard.
The word has travelled a long way from where it started. A bavaroise in the eighteenth century was a hot drink -- tea or milk sweetened with sugar syrup, often with capillaire, sometimes with a spirit -- and its name is generally traced to the Bavarian princes for whom it was said to have been made in Paris. By the nineteenth century French professional cookery had attached the name to something quite different: the bavarois, a moulded cream of egg custard and whipped cream set with gelatine or isinglass, turned out and served cold. The shape of the page tells you how such books were used. Ingredients were given as short lists headed "For the --", one for each element, on the assumption that the cook already knew how a custard was made and needed only the master's proportions and flavourings.