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Bavarian Cream Cheaper
3 pints of rich milk. 1 cupful of cream. 12 ounces of sugar. 2 ounces of gelatine. 6 whites of eggs. Flavoring.
Set the milk over the fire with the sugar and gelatine in it and stir till the gelatine is all dissolved. Do not let it boil. Strain into a freezer placed in ice water and when nearly cold enough to set add the cup of cream, beat 10 minutes, whip the 6 whites firm, stir that in and beat the cream 5 minutes more. Flavor while heating with lemon, vanilla, almond, or other extract, instead of maraschino.
King Louis did not keep his huge establishments for profit and made his Bavarian about like this--quite costly: 1 quart of double cream, 2 1/4 ounces of gelatine, 6 ounces of powdered sugar, 1 cup of milk, 1/2 cup of noyan or other liqueur. Dissolve the gelatine in the milk in a warm place. Put the sugar in the cream, whip it to troth, drain the froth and whip again what drips through. Put back in the pan, pour the dissolved gelatine to the whipped cream a little at a time, add the flavor and put the cream in molds slightly oiled with sweet oil and set on ice. This, it may be observed, is barely one remove from the iced froths noticed among the ices. The froth is congealed by means of gelatine very cold instead of frost, and might be in glasses as well.
This is a cold-set bavarois in two versions, an economical one built on milk and a "costly" one built on whipped double cream. Neither can be recommended as written, for reasons that are specific to how the eggs and the flavoring are handled.
- The egg whites are never cookedSix whites are whipped raw and folded into a milk, sugar and gelatine base that has already been strained into a freezer and chilled almost to setting point. Nothing in the finished cream ever reaches a temperature that would reliably inactivate Salmonella, and the sweet, low-acid base offers no help. A current recipe using pasteurised whites, or a cooked base, should be used instead.
- "Do not let it boil" is doing double dutyThe instruction plausibly protects the gelatine, which loses setting power with prolonged high heat, and keeps the milk from scorching. It should not be read as a food-safety step: no temperature is given, and in any case the raw whites are added after the base has been cooled.
- NoyauThe liqueur called for in the second version was traditionally flavored with peach or apricot kernels, or with bitter almonds, and older commercial and homemade versions could carry meaningful amounts of cyanogenic compounds. Note that the author himself offers lemon, vanilla or almond extract as a substitute in the first version.
- Gelatine is not the same productTwo ounces of nineteenth-century sheet or shred gelatine is not interchangeable with two ounces of modern powdered gelatine, which is far more consistently and often more strongly setting. Any attempt to read these quantities across to a modern box is guesswork.
- "Freezer" means the vesselThe freezer here is the metal can of an ice-cream churn, which the recipe sets in ice water. The mixture is beaten in it to aerate it while it chills; it is not frozen.
- Sweet oil for the moldsSweet oil is plain olive oil, used in a thin film so the set cream releases. It is the period equivalent of a lightly oiled mold and the only greasing the recipe intends.
Bavarian cream, bavarois or fromage bavarois in French kitchens, is a gelatine-set cream that entered the grand repertoire in the early nineteenth century and was codified by pastry cooks in the Carême tradition; the connection to Bavaria itself is traditional rather than documented. What makes this entry characteristic of an American trade manual is the framing: it is headed 'Bavarian Cream Cheaper', built on three pints of milk with only a cup of cream, and the lavish all-cream version is offered as a curiosity attributed to a French king. That framing suggests, though a single page can only suggest it, a book written for men working to a food cost. The recipe also depends entirely on commercial gelatine, which by the late nineteenth century was sold in sheets and shreds cheaply enough that a confectioner could set large quantities of cream without the day-long labor of boiling down calves' feet, and the author's closing remark — that the froth is congealed by gelatine rather than by frost — is a working pastry cook explaining, quite precisely, where a Bavarian sits between an iced dessert and a jelly.