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Two Eggs (One ounce of Gelatine)
One ounce of Gelatine.
Three ounces of Loaf Sugar.
Half a pint of Milk.
Half a pint of Cream.
Half a gill of strong Coffee, or Essence of Coffee.
Make half a pint of custard with the eggs and milk. Dissolve the gelatine and sugar in the coffee; add the custard, and strain; whip the cream, and stir lightly into the custard when cool.
Pour into the mould, and set.
This is a coffee bavarois — a gelatine-set custard lightened with whipped cream — written in the telegraphic style of a cookery-school notebook, where the title carries the first two ingredients and the rest follow on. Read it as a cold moulded cream despite the section it sits in.
- The full ingredient listTwo eggs, 1 oz gelatine, 3 oz loaf sugar, half a pint of milk, half a pint of cream, half a gill of strong coffee. Loaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone; granulated is the direct substitute.
- Imperial measuresA gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, so half a gill is about 2.5 fl oz, a generous quarter-cup. Half an imperial pint is 10 fl oz, not 8 — the whole recipe runs to roughly 1 pint 2 fl oz of liquid.
- Cut the gelatineAn ounce of modern powdered or leaf gelatine will set this very firmly indeed. Modern gelatine is standardised by strength and more reliable than the sheet gelatine of the nineteenth century, which varied a good deal; around half an ounce should be ample for this volume if the cream is to be turned out of a mould, less if served in glasses.
- The custard is the hingeCook the eggs and milk to a coating consistency over gentle heat, around 175-180F. Past 185F it curdles, and there is no rescuing a scrambled base once the gelatine is in.
- Dissolve, do not boilWarm the coffee just enough to melt the gelatine and sugar. Held at a hard boil, gelatine loses setting power, and boiled coffee turns bitter.
- Fold at the right moment"When cool" means when the custard has thickened to the point of just beginning to set at the edges. Fold whipped cream into a warm base and it deflates and separates into layers; fold it into a set base and you get lumps.
- Setting and turning outFour hours in the refrigerator, or overnight. Dip the mould briefly in hot water and invert onto a wetted plate.
- YieldAbout 1 pint 2 fl oz of mixture — six modest servings from a single mould, or six small glasses.
The dish is a crème bavaroise, or bavarois: a custard set with gelatine and lightened with whipped cream, a form generally traced to the French professional kitchen of the early nineteenth century and often credited to Carême, whose repertoire underpinned the British cookery schools of the period. Coffee was one of the standard flavourings alongside vanilla, chocolate and liqueurs, and "essence of coffee" — a sweetened bottled concentrate, of which Camp is the survivor — was the convenient version for a kitchen that did not want to brew a fresh pot for half a gill of liquid. Worth noting too is the packet gelatine itself: commercially refined gelatine, sold by the ounce, spared the cook the day-long labour of boiling calves' feet for jelly, and it is what allowed a moulded cream to become a routine dinner-party sweet rather than a set-piece. The compressed, listing style here is characteristic of recipes taken down at cookery-school demonstrations, where the instructor's hands supplied everything the text leaves out.