Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Almond Bavarois
Almond Bavarois
Put a small quantity of gelatine into a basin with a little milk and soak it for two hours. Put sufficient cream into a basin, and whip until there is but one-third of the amount left, the remainder being in a stiff froth. Put the blanched sweet almonds into a mortar, pound them well, mix in the unwhipped cream, and add two or three eggs beaten up with a little sugar. Put the whole into a saucepan and stir it over the fire until the preparation commences to thicken. Add the gelatine, remove the pan from the fire, pour the whole through a sieve into a basin, and put in a very small amount of essence of almonds. Whisk well until the mixture thickens, then add the whipped cream, stir well, and pour the cream into moulds packed on ice. When it is set and firm, turn it out onto a dish, and serve. Whipped cream should accompany it.
Oscar gives proportions almost nowhere, which was normal in a professional kitchen where the cook already knew the ratio for a bavarois. Here are the working numbers and the one step that decides whether it sets or curdles.
- Working quantitiesFor six moulds: 2 cups heavy cream, 4 oz blanched sweet almonds, 3 egg yolks (or the "two or three" whole eggs the original allows), 1/3 cup sugar, and 2 1/2 teaspoons powdered gelatine. The original's "small quantity" of gelatine and "sufficient cream" are genuinely unspecified and cannot be recovered from the text.
- The hinge: custard temperature"Until the preparation commences to thicken" means about 175-180F on a thermometer, stirred constantly over low heat. Past 185F the eggs scramble and no amount of sieving will bring the texture back.
- Soaking the gelatineTwo hours applies to the coarse sheet and shred gelatine of the period. Modern powdered gelatine blooms in cold milk in five minutes; leaf gelatine in cold water in ten. Stir it into the hot custard off the heat until fully dissolved.
- Whipping the creamThe instruction to whip "until there is but one-third of the amount left" describes the liquid cream remaining in the bowl beneath the froth. Divide the cream instead: about two-thirds whipped to soft peaks, one-third left liquid for the custard.
- Pounding the almondsA mortar and a little of the liquid cream gives a coarse almond milk. A food processor does it faster; add the cream gradually or the almonds turn to paste and oil out. Straining through a fine sieve, as directed, is not optional.
- Essence of almondsNineteenth-century almond essence was made from bitter almonds and was probably stronger than much of what is sold now. Use 1/4 teaspoon of modern almond extract at most, added after the custard is off the heat so the aroma is not driven off.
- Moulds packed on iceSubstitute the refrigerator: four hours minimum, overnight for a large mould. Rinse the moulds in cold water before filling and unmould by dipping the base in warm water for a few seconds.
- Yield and servingEnough for six individual moulds or one 1-quart mould. Serve cold with additional softly whipped cream, as directed; a few toasted almond slices are in keeping.
A bavarois, or Bavarian cream, is a stirred custard set with gelatine and lightened with whipped cream — a construction codified in French professional kitchens in the nineteenth century and named, by tradition rather than documented fact, for the Bavarian court that French chefs of the period served. Carême and later Escoffier treated it as a family of desserts built on one method with a changed flavouring: vanilla, coffee, chocolate, strawberry, or as here almonds pounded to a milk in the mortar. That Oscar Tschirky records it with no quantities at all is itself informative — The Cook Book (1896) was compiled by the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel and drew on the working repertoire of a hotel brigade, where a cook needed the sequence of operations rather than a scale reading. The instruction to pack the moulds on ice is the other mark of its date: reliable mechanical refrigeration was arriving in large hotels, but a dessert like this still set in a tub of crushed ice and salt.</td>