Home › Creams, Jellies and Cold Sweets › Three Eggs (II)
Three Eggs (II)
Ingredients.
Half a pint of Milk.
Half a pint of Double Cream.
One ounce of Gelatine.
Two ounces of Castor Sugar.
Half a teaspoonful of Essence of Vanilla.
Make a custard of the milk, three yolks of eggs and one white, melt the gelatine in two tablespoonfuls of water, and strain it into the custard, mixing it well. Whip the cream to a stiff froth, adding the sugar and vanilla. When the custard is sufficiently cool, stir the whipped cream lightly into it, and pour it into a mould to set.
This is a vanilla Bavarian cream in all but name: a thin egg custard set with gelatine and lightened with whipped cream. Two things decide whether it works — the strength of the gelatine and the temperature of the custard when the cream goes in.
- The gelatine is far too muchOne ounce (28 g) of gelatine to a pint of liquid was normal when leaf gelatine was weak and inconsistent; modern powdered gelatine will give you something closer to rubber. For 10 fl oz milk plus 10 fl oz cream, 10-12 g of powdered gelatine (about 4 sheets of platinum leaf) sets a cream that turns out of a mould and still yields to a spoon.
- Half a pintImperial measure, so 10 fl oz / 300 ml each of milk and cream, not the American 8 oz cup. Double cream is roughly 48% fat; heavy or whipping cream is the nearest substitute.
- Castor sugar and essenceCastor sugar is superfine sugar, which dissolves into whipped cream without grittiness. Essence of vanilla means vanilla extract; half a teaspoon is modest for this quantity and a full teaspoon is closer to modern taste.
- Cook the custard properlyThree yolks and one white in 10 fl oz milk is a light custard. Cook it over gentle heat, stirring, until it coats the back of a spoon (about 175-180F / 80-82C), then strain at once. Take it much beyond that and the egg begins to curdle.
- Softening the gelatineTwo tablespoons of water is enough to soften powdered gelatine; let it swell for five minutes, then dissolve it in the warm custard. Avoid prolonged boiling, which can reduce its setting power.
- The hinge: temperature at folding"Sufficiently cool" means the custard is cool to the touch and just beginning to thicken at the edges — around 68-70F / 20C. Warm custard deflates the cream and the mixture separates into a jelly layer under a foam layer; cold custard seizes into lumps you cannot fold out.
- Moulding and turning outRinse the mould with cold water rather than oiling it. Chill at least four hours, ideally overnight. Dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a wetted plate so the cream can be slid into place.
- YieldAbout 1 pint 4 fl oz of finished mixture — six small moulds or one 1 1/2 pint mould, serving four to six.
A custard set with gelatine and lifted with whipped cream is the crème bavaroise of nineteenth-century French professional cookery, anglicised in British books as Bavarian cream and, in humbler versions, as a "cream mould." Its rise owed much to commercial gelatine: earlier cooks boiled calves' feet or used isinglass to make their own setting jelly, while by the later nineteenth century packets of sheet gelatine could be bought ready to use, and moulded cold sweets were a common finish to a dinner. The title appears to come from grouping such creams by the number of eggs they use. The generous dose of gelatine may also reflect the need for a mould to stand up while being carried to the table, though that is inference rather than documented.