Rose Cream
Make Bavarian, flavor slightly with rose extract and color it light pink.
This is a one-line variation that assumes you already have the book's Bavarian cream in front of you: an egg custard set with gelatin and lightened with whipped cream. The whole difficulty is in the flavoring, which is easy to overdo.
- The baseA Bavarian is generally a stirred custard (milk, egg yolks, sugar) with bloomed gelatin dissolved into it, cooled to the point of thickening, then folded with softly whipped cream and set in a mold. As a modern working figure, about 2 teaspoons powdered gelatin per pint of liquid will give something that stands when turned out, though period proportions vary.
- The hinge: cool before foldingThe custard must be cold enough to mound slightly on a spoon before the whipped cream goes in. Fold too early and the cream melts and the mixture separates into a rubbery jelly layer under a foam; too late and it sets in lumps.
- Rose extract is not rose water"Rose extract" of the period was normally an alcoholic concentrate, and generally stronger than the rose water sold today, though strengths varied by maker. Start with a few drops of extract per quart of cream, or a tablespoon or so of rose water, and taste. Overdone, rose reads as soap.
- Custard temperatureCook the custard to about 170-175F, stirring, until it coats the back of a spoon. Much above 180F the yolks begin to curdle, and prolonged boiling can weaken gelatin's setting power.
- Light pinkThe coloring is unspecified; cochineal was a common period red for this purpose, though other colorants were also available. A drop or two of red food coloring diluted in a spoonful of water gives more control; add it to the custard before the cream is folded in, since the cream will lighten the shade considerably.
- Molding and unmoldingOil the mold very lightly, chill at least 4 hours, and dip the mold in warm water for 5 to 10 seconds before inverting. Fluted charlotte and melon molds were among the shapes used for Bavarians; a loaf pan or individual ramekins work as well.
- YieldA quart of finished mixture serves eight to ten in a mold, or six generously in cups.
Bavarian cream — bavarois in the French kitchen from which American pastry cooks took nearly all their vocabulary — is a nineteenth-century restaurant standard whose connection to Bavaria is traditional rather than documented; French pastry cooks were already treating it as a fixed formula by the mid-1800s. Trade books like this one rarely repeat a base recipe. They give the master preparation once and then list the variations as a single line apiece: coffee, chocolate, pistachio, orange, rose. Floral flavorings had a long run in American confectionery, rose water in particular arriving in colonial kitchens by way of English cookery and holding on well into the era of vanilla's dominance. By the time this book was written rose had become a fancy-shop flavor rather than an everyday one, and it appears here with a pale pink tint that told the customer at the counter what the spoon was going to taste like.