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Bavarian Cream
Sweeten one pint thick cream to your taste and flavor it with lemon or vanilla. Churn the cream to a froth, skim off the froth as it rises and put it in a glass dish. Dissolve one and a half tablespoonfuls gelatine in warm water, and when dissolved pour into the froth and stir fifteen minutes. Set in a cold place and it will be ready for use in a few hours.--Mrs. D. R. Bavarian Cream.
Soak half a box gelatine in cold water till thoroughly dissolved. Then add three pints milk or cream, and put on the fire till scalding hot, stirring all the while. Then take it off and add three teacups sugar and the yolks of eight eggs (by spoonfuls) stirring all the time. Set on the fire again and let it remain till quite hot. Then take it off and add the eight beaten whites and eight teaspoonfuls vanilla. Put into moulds to coo.--Mrs. N. A. L.
Two contributors' versions sit side by side: a quick gelatine-set whipped cream, and a proper bavaroise built on an egg custard. Both hinge on getting the gelatine in at the right temperature.
- The gelatine temperature is everythingIn the first recipe, gelatine poured hot into cold whipped cream sets in threads and grains before it can disperse. Let the dissolved gelatine cool to just barely warm, stir a spoonful of the cream into it to temper, then fold that back in. In the second, the same rule applies in reverse: the gelatine is bloomed cold and dissolved by the scalding milk.
- Do not stir fifteen minutesFifteen minutes of stirring will knock the air out of whipped cream. The instruction may reflect the slower-setting gelatine of the period; with modern powdered gelatine, fold gently for under a minute and get it into the dish and the refrigerator.
- "Churn the cream to a froth"A syllabub churn or whisk was used to raise a froth that was skimmed off in layers, leaving thin liquid behind. A mixer whipping to soft peaks does the same job in one step; skip the skimming.
- Half a box of gelatineGenuinely ambiguous — boxes varied by brand and decade. As a working rate, count on about one modern envelope (2 1/4 teaspoons) per 2 cups of liquid for a spoonable cream and a little more if you intend to unmould, which puts three pints at roughly three to four envelopes. The first recipe's 1 1/2 tablespoons to one pint is a firm, sliceable set.
- Teacups and vanillaA teacup in books of this period is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, so three teacups would be roughly 2 1/4 cups sugar -- sweet by current taste and readily reduced by a third. Eight teaspoonfuls of vanilla suggests a weaker home flavouring; 1 to 2 teaspoons of modern extract is ample.
- The custard stage"Till quite hot" means thickened to a nappe that coats a spoon, around 175-180F. Past that the eight yolks scramble. Stir constantly over low heat or use a bain-marie.
- The raw whitesThe beaten whites go into custard that has been taken off the fire, so they are never properly cooked. If that matters to your household, use pasteurized whites, or leave them out and lighten the set custard with whipped cream instead.
- Moulding and yield"To coo" is a printer's slip for "to cool." Rinse the moulds in cold water or film them with neutral oil; to turn out, dip briefly in warm water and invert. The second recipe makes a large quantity — enough for ten to twelve.
Bavarian cream is the French kitchen's crème bavaroise: a custard set with gelatine and lightened with whipped cream or beaten whites, standard in nineteenth-century pastry work and generally traced, by way of its name only, to cooks working for the Bavarian court. Its appearance in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) — the heading falls after Mrs. D. R.'s signature and belongs to the recipe that follows it, the preceding lines running on from a different receipt — shows how the book was assembled: Marion Cabell Tyree gathered recipes from Virginia households and printed them as received. What made the dish practical for those households was packaged gelatine, available by the 1870s and sparing cooks the older labour of boiling calves' feet or clarifying isinglass for the same purpose. The version with no eggs at all is really a set whipped cream and belongs to the older syllabub tradition; the titled recipe is the classic construction.