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Compotes, Etc., of Fruit: Petites
It is usually dressed in little moulds as Petites crèmes.
Bavaroise aux pommes is a custard made of a purée of apples, with eggs and cream. aux poires is made in the same way with pears. aux pistaches - pounded pistachio nuts and almonds, etc., with custard, coloured green; sprinkled with chopped pistachio nuts. au café is coffee custard. à la Mont-Ida is a raspberry custard. glacée is iced Bavarian cream. à la Ceylon is a chocolate custard set in a mould lined with a mottled pink and white cream, flavoured with lemon and liqueur.
Nothing on this page is a compote. The chapter heading has run on past its subject into cold moulded creams, and what is being described throughout is a bavarois: custard, gelatine and whipped cream, set in a mould and turned out.
- How a bavarois is builtA cooked egg custard, gelatine dissolved into it while it is still warm, then whipped cream folded in once the base has begun to thicken. Fold too early and the cream sinks to the bottom; too late and you cannot fold at all.
- Custard here means crème anglaiseStirred on the stove with yolks until it coats a spoon, not baked. Where the page says a purée of apples or pears with eggs and cream, the fruit is going into that stirred base and nowhere else.
- GelatineNo quantity is given, because the strength of the leaf in use was known in that kitchen and the cook judged it. Leaf and powder are not interchangeable spoon for sheet, so whichever you buy, work from the quantity on its own packet rather than from the page.
- Turning outDip the mould briefly in hot water and it releases; a cold mould left to loosen on its own will not. The Ceylon cream has to be lined first, with the mottled pink and white set against the mould wall before the chocolate custard goes in.
- The greenPistachios and almonds pounded together give a dull fawn, not the green the page wants. That colour came from added colouring, and leaving it out produces a better-tasting and far less startling cream.
A cream that holds its shape on a dish is a claim about a household’s cold storage. Every dish on this page has to be set, chilled and kept chilled long enough to be carried to a table, which in a house without mechanical refrigeration meant an ice house or an ice chest and somebody whose job was to keep it stocked. That is why the moulded cream became the signature of a certain kind of dinner and why it fell out of fashion the moment refrigeration stopped being remarkable: once anyone could serve something cold, there was nothing to announce. The flavours point outward in the same way the cold pointed upward — coffee, chocolate under the name of Ceylon, pistachio — while the raspberry cream borrows the name of Mount Ida, which the raspberry’s own botanical name carries too.