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Bavarian Macedoine
Line a mold with strawberry Bavarian, one inch thick, set another mold on top of this Bavarian and pour in strawberry Bavarian to the top of the mold. Chill. When hardened, remove second mold and fill with alternate layers beaten cream, chopped nuts and chopped fruit.
A moulded gelatin dessert written for a cook who already had the book's strawberry Bavarian recipe in front of her. The instructions are terse to the point of ambiguity, and the sequence of the two moulds is the part worth getting right.
- Read the mould instructions againThe wording is compressed: you line the mould first, then set a second, smaller mould on that layer of Bavarian and pour more Bavarian into the gap between them, so the mixture sets as a one-inch shell. Weight the inner mould with pie weights or ice water or it will float.
- Line, then fillChill the shell until firm all the way through before lifting the inner mould out — an hour or more, and longer than you think. If the walls are still soft, the filling will slump through them and the whole thing collapses on turning out.
- Removing the inner mouldDip a cloth in warm water and wipe the outside of the inner mould, or half-fill it briefly with warm water, then twist gently. Forcing it dry tears the shell.
- "Beaten cream"This means heavy cream whipped to soft peaks and lightly sweetened, not a cooked custard. Fold nothing into it; the layering does the work.
- Chopped fruitChop it fine, pieces no larger than a pea, and drain it well. Fresh pineapple, kiwi and papaya will digest the gelatin in the shell — use canned pineapple or avoid them entirely.
- Gelatin strengthA Bavarian meant to stand as a self-supporting wall needs to be set firmer than one served in a glass. If your strawberry Bavarian is a soft-set recipe, it will need somewhat more gelatin.
- Turning out and servingChill the assembled mould at least four hours, then dip the base in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a cold platter. Slice it in wedges so each shows the shell and the layers.
Macédoine is French kitchen shorthand for a mixture of small-diced fruit or vegetables, the name traditionally explained as a nod to the many peoples gathered under Macedonian rule — a culinary pun of the sort nineteenth-century cookbooks repeated without much evidence. Bavarian cream, crème bavaroise, is a custard or fruit purée set with gelatin and lightened with whipped cream, codified in French professional cooking in the 1800s and carried into American household books as gelatin became cheap and reliable in packets. Combining the two into a moulded shell filled with cream, nuts and fruit is exactly the kind of showpiece that made sense in a period when a turned-out gelatin dessert was the visible proof of a competent kitchen, and when Lowney's Cook Book — issued by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in the early 1900s — was aiming to teach ambitious home cooks confectioner's tricks.