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Raspberry Bavarian Cream
1/2 box of gelatine 1/2 cup of sugar 1 pint of raspberry juice 1 pint of cream 1/2 cup of water Cover the gelatine with the water, and soak a half hour; then stand it over boiling water until thoroughly dissolved, add to it the sugar and raspberry juice, and strain into a tin basin. Place the basin in a pan of cracked ice, and stir continually until it thickens, then add the cream whipped; stir carefully until thoroughly mixed. Pour into a mould, and stand in a cold place to harden.
A straightforward gelatine cream that depends entirely on catching the mixture at the right stage of set before the whipped cream goes in. Everything else is assembly.
- Half a box of gelatineBoxed granulated gelatine of the period commonly ran about 1 oz to the box, divided into papers of about 1/4 oz. Half a box is therefore roughly 1/2 oz, or two modern 1/4-oz envelopes.
- Soak, then dissolve gentlyHalf an hour in 1/2 cup cold water to bloom, then over boiling water — a bowl set on a saucepan. Gelatine dissolved over direct heat, or boiled, loses setting power.
- A pint of raspberry juiceTwo cups. Expect to crush and strain something like 2 to 2 1/2 lb of berries; sieving cooked, lightly sweetened fruit gives more juice than pressing them raw. Strained bottled or frozen-fruit juice works, but taste it — commercial juice is usually sweeter than the original assumes and the 1/2 cup sugar may want cutting.
- Strain, and mean itRaspberry seeds are the failure point of this dessert. Pass the sweetened juice through a fine sieve or a doubled layer of cheesecloth before it meets the cream.
- The hinge: stir over ice until it thickensThe mixture must be chilled to the consistency of unbeaten egg white — thick, but still pourable — before the cream is folded in. Add the cream too early and the fruit layer sinks and sets separately; too late and the gelatine seizes into lumps you cannot smooth out. Stir constantly and check every 30 seconds once it begins to coat the spoon.
- The tin basinChosen because thin metal transfers cold from the ice quickly. Any metal bowl does the same job; glass and ceramic are much slower and make the timing harder to judge.
- Whipped creamA pint of heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks rather than stiff — stiff cream will not fold into a setting gelatine without breaking up. Fold rather than stir, in two or three additions.
- Setting and turning outFour hours in the refrigerator, or overnight. The finished mixture comes to something like 1 1/2 to 2 quarts, so allow a two-quart mould. Rinse the mould with cold water before filling, and dip it briefly in warm water to release. Serves 8.
Bavarian cream — crème bavaroise in French kitchen usage — is one of the cold moulded creams that nineteenth-century professional cookery built on gelatine and ice, and its connection to Bavaria is traditional rather than documented; the name is generally traced to French chefs of the early 1800s rather than to any Bavarian original. The classic version sets a custard base with gelatine and lightens it with whipped cream, but by the end of the century American cookbooks routinely replaced the custard with fruit juice, which is faster, keeps better in warm weather, and needs no cooking of eggs. That is exactly why it turns up in a book of hot weather dishes: the whole thing is made over a pan of cracked ice, at a time when ice was delivered rather than made at home, and a mould that could be set aside in a cold cellar to firm was the summer equivalent of a baked pudding.