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Raspberry Bavarian
Prepare the same as Strawberry Bavarian, adding two tablespoons lemon juice, and substituting raspberry juice for strawberry juice.
A one-line variation that only works if you have the parent recipe in front of you; everything of substance lives in the Strawberry Bavarian entry. What follows applies to Bavarians of this period generally, plus the specific problems raspberries bring.
- Read the base recipe firstQuantities of gelatin, sugar and cream are all in the Strawberry Bavarian. Work from those numbers and change only the two things named here: swap the fruit juice and add the lemon.
- Why the lemon is addedWhy the lemon may be added -- The recipe does not say. Raspberry flavour is delicate and flattens once diluted with cream, and two tablespoons of lemon juice would sharpen it rather than contribute to the set, so treat it as part of the flavouring and not an optional garnish.
- Getting the juiceCrush ripe berries with sugar, let them stand, then press through a fine sieve or jelly bag; the recipe itself leaves the method to the parent entry. Raspberry seeds are hard and gritty in a cream dessert, so strain more thoroughly than you would for a sauce. Frozen raspberries, thawed and pressed, often give up their juice readily.
- Granulated gelatinPeriod recipes assume a granulated gelatin softened in cold water and dissolved over hot water. One envelope of modern unflavoured gelatin is about a scant tablespoon and sets roughly two cups of liquid to unmolding firmness. If the base recipe calls for sheet or shredded gelatin, weigh rather than guess.
- The hinge: temperature when you foldThe gelatin-and-juice mixture must be cooled to the point where it mounds slightly on a spoon before the whipped cream goes in. Fold it in warm and the cream melts and separates into a jelly layer under a foam layer; let it set too far and it goes lumpy and will not combine.
- Chilling and unmoldingFour hours in the refrigerator for a small mould, six or overnight for a quart. To turn out, dip the mould in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a chilled plate. A lightly oiled mould releases more reliably than a dry one.
- YieldA standard quart mould of Bavarian serves six to eight. It is best eaten the day it is made; gelatin sets of this kind tend to weep as they stand.
Bavarian cream, crème bavaroise, is a nineteenth-century French pastry construction — a flavoured base lightened with whipped cream and set with gelatin — whose connection to Bavaria is traditional rather than documented, and generally traced to French chefs working for Bavarian noble households. By the time Lowney's Cook Book appeared in 1907, commercially packaged granulated gelatin had turned what was once a laborious dish requiring boiled-down calves' feet into something an ordinary American household could attempt, and cookbooks of the period accordingly print Bavarians in long strings of variations: strawberry, raspberry, peach, coffee, chocolate, each one a two-line note pointing back to the first. That publishing shorthand is itself a sign of how standardised the technique had become. The book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer.