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Coffee Bavarian Cream
Use the recipe for Bavarian Cream, adding one-half cup of strong coffee to every three cups of the mixture.
This is a variation, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's Bavarian Cream at hand — a cooked egg custard set with gelatin and lightened with whipped cream. The points below concern the things the one-line instruction leaves out.
- Keep the liquid in balanceThe half cup of coffee is added liquid, and gelatin sets by ratio. If you want the same firmness as the base recipe, subtract that half cup from the milk for every three cups of mixture; otherwise the cream may set softer than intended.
- "Strong coffee" means strongRead this as double-strength drip or a few ounces of espresso diluted, not a cup of breakfast coffee. Diluted coffee reads as a dull off-flavour rather than a flavour, and you cannot add more without wrecking the set.
- Add it cold, at the right momentAdd it at the right moment -- Stir the coffee into the custard once it has been strained and while it is still warm enough to hold the gelatin in solution, before folding in the whipped cream. Coffee poured into a nearly set mixture will streak.
- Custard temperatureCook the base custard to 170-180F, stirring, until it coats a spoon. Above about 185F the eggs curdle and no amount of straining will bring back the texture.
- Gelatin then and nowIn 1911 gelatin came both in sheets and in granulated packets, and either was soaked in cold water before dissolving. Modern powdered gelatin blooms in cold liquid in five minutes; one envelope is a scant tablespoon, roughly enough to set two cups.
- Whipping the creamWhip to soft peaks only. Stiffly whipped cream folds in as lumps and gives a grainy Bavarian rather than a smooth one.
- Moulding and unmouldingRinse the mould with cold water, chill at least four hours, then dip the outside briefly in warm water and invert. A quart mould serves six to eight.
- Decaf and instantInstant coffee dissolved in a little hot water works, though it tastes flatter. Decaf behaves identically; caffeine has no effect on gelatin.
Bavarian cream — crème bavaroise in French kitchen French — is a cold custard set with gelatin and enriched with whipped cream, and the name is generally traced to Bavaria without any firm account of how it got there; nineteenth-century French chefs treated it as a standard entremets and built out endless flavour variations, of which coffee was among the most common alongside vanilla, chocolate and fruit purées. Its appearance here in a shorthand one-line form is typical of turn-of-the-century American household manuals, which taught a base preparation once and then listed its offspring, expecting the cook to hold the master recipe in her head. The Butterick Company was a dress-pattern publisher that moved into domestic advice through magazines such as The Delineator, and its cook book aimed squarely at the middle-class housekeeper who wanted a moulded dessert impressive enough for company and cheap enough to repeat.