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Chocolate Cream
1 quart of milk. 8 ounces of sugar. 1 ounce of gelatine. 2 ounces of grated common chocolate. 8 yolks of eggs and 3 whites. 1 cup of cream. Vanilla extract.
Set the milk over the fire with the sugar chocolate and gelatine in it. Beat as it heats with the wire whisk till all is dissolved. Beat the yolks in a bowl and at the first sign of boiling add them to the milk on the fire, let remain about a minute then strain into a freezer set in ice water. Rinse out the thick chocolate custard that adheres to the kettle with the cup of cream and add that to the other in the freezer. Flavor with vanilla, beat up as it cools and at last add the 3 whites whipped firm and beat up 5 minutes more. Put the cream in oiled molds or serve it by spoonfuls out of the freezer with a spoonful of sweetened cream whipped to froth as a sauce
A hotel-kitchen Bavarian cream, written for cooks who had an ice-cream freezer standing in the pastry room. It cannot be made as printed, and the reason is the three egg whites.
- The raw whites are the problemThe yolks are cooked into the milk, but the three whipped whites go into a cooled custard and are never heated at all. The finished cream is then set in a mold and served cold, so nothing in the process brings the whites to a safe temperature. Use a current recipe for chocolate Bavarian cream or mousse instead.
- Why it mattered less in 1894Why it mattered less then -- A hotel pastry department would plausibly have turned eggs over quickly and served the dessert the same day, though the working practice is not documented in detail. Modern egg-handling advice reflects Salmonella Enteritidis, which was not a recognized concern in intact shell eggs until the 1980s, and a chilled uncooked foam is one of the situations it is specifically flagged for.
- "Common chocolate"Unsweetened cake chocolate, the plain ground-and-molded kind sold for cooking, as opposed to the sweetened eating chocolates. Two ounces against eight ounces of sugar is what gives this cream its light, milky color rather than a modern dark-chocolate depth.
- "A freezer"The can of a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer, set in ice water and used here purely as a chilling and beating vessel. Nothing is frozen: the ice bath keeps the gelatine liquid while the mixture is whipped, which is what makes the cream light.
- An ounce of gelatineThat is roughly four modern quarter-ounce envelopes to a quart of milk, a firm unmolding set by today's taste. Period gelatine came in sheets or shreds of variable strength, so the figure is not directly comparable to granulated powder.
- Oiled moldsMolds were wiped with a neutral oil rather than butter, so the cream would release cleanly and the surface would not pick up a buttery film. Sweet almond oil was among the oils recommended for the purpose in period pastry writing.
- YieldA quart of milk, a cup of cream and eight eggs (all eight yolks, three of the whites) makes a substantial quantity, enough for a number of molded portions or a single large mold for a table.
Jessup Whitehead's The American Pastry Cook was written for the men who ran hotel and restaurant pastry departments in the 1880s and 90s, and this is a plain working version of the French crème bavaroise — a custard set with gelatine, lightened with whipped cream or beaten whites, and turned out of a mold. The name is often traced to French chefs of the early nineteenth century rather than to Bavaria itself, though the etymology remains unsettled, with competing stories linking it to the Wittelsbach court and to French chefs employed by Bavarian princes. What dates the recipe most clearly is the freezer can standing in ice water: before mechanical refrigeration, the ice-cream freezer offered a dependable source of cold, and it seems to have served here as a chilling bowl for a mixture that had to be beaten cold. The modest two ounces of chocolate is also of its moment, when chocolate was still an expensive flavoring used to tint and scent a milk pudding rather than the dominant ingredient it became after cocoa prices fell.