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Jelly, Pistachios and Cocoanut
Dissolve the chocolate, cut up roughly, in the milk, pour on to the yolks, sugar and flavouring mixed together, strain and cook as for custard.
Dissolve the gelatine in a little water and mix to the chocolate custard; wring through muslin, L2 add the whipped cream, and pour into a lined and decorated mould.
Note. A mould for chocolate or coffee cream should be lined with jelly to prevent the mixture going a bad colour on the outside.
This is a chocolate bavarois — a cooked custard set with gelatine and lightened with whipped cream — printed in the terse professional style of a cookery-school notebook, where the ingredient list sat elsewhere on the page or in the instructor's head. The method is sound; what it lacks is numbers.
- No quantities are givenThe text assumes a standard cream base you already know. A workable ratio for this style is 1 pint (500 ml) milk, 6 egg yolks, 3 oz (85 g) sugar, 3 oz (85 g) dark chocolate, about 1/2 oz (14 g) powdered gelatine, and 1/2 pint (300 ml) cream whipped to soft peaks — but that is a reconstruction, not the author's figure.
- The hinge: custard temperature"Cook as for custard" means over gentle heat, stirring, until it coats the back of a spoon — around 175-180F (80-82C). Chocolate and sugar mask the first signs of curdling, so use a thermometer rather than eyesight.
- Blooming the gelatineLeaf gelatine was widely used in British professional kitchens; "dissolve in a little water" means soften it in cold water first, then melt it. Powdered gelatine should be sprinkled over a few tablespoons of cold water, left five minutes, then warmed until clear. Add it to the custard while the custard is still hot, never to a cold mixture.
- "Wring through muslin"The custard was squeezed through a cloth (a tammy) to remove any threads of cooked egg and undissolved chocolate. A fine chinois or a doubled sieve does the same work with less mess.
- Folding in the creamThe custard must be cooled to the point of thickening — barely setting at the edges of the bowl — before the whipped cream goes in. Too warm and the cream melts out; too cold and the mixture sets in lumps as you fold.
- The lined mouldThe note is the most practical line in the recipe. A thin coat of clear jelly set inside a chilled mould gives the turned-out cream a glossy surface and, as the recipe says, keeps the mixture from going a bad colour on the outside. What the "decoration" consisted of is not stated in the recipe itself.
- Unmoulding and yieldUnmoulding -- Chill at least 4 hours, preferably overnight. Dip the mould in warm — not hot — water for a few seconds and invert onto a wet plate so the cream can be nudged into position.
Chocolate cream of this kind is the English form of the French bavarois, a cooked custard set with isinglass or gelatine and enriched with whipped cream, which entered grand British cookery through the French-trained chefs of the nineteenth century and settled comfortably into the repertoire of the cookery schools that multiplied after the 1870s. That tradition may explain the compressed style here: the reader is expected to know the standard custard proportions and needs only the variation. The instruction to line the mould with jelly reads as a working cook's detail rather than a domestic one, the sort of thing taught in a demonstration kitchen rather than found in a family receipt book.