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Bavarois of Pineapple
Peel the pine, cut it into slices one-eighth inch in thickness, put them in a preserving pan with eight ounces of loaf sugar, one-half ounce of isinglass and one-half teacupful of water. Put the pan over a moderate fire, and stew the contents till tender, keeping them well stirred. Rub the pine through a fine hair-sieve into a basin, stand it on ice and keep it stirred till on the point of setting, them mix in thoroughly one pint of well-whipped cream. Pour the bavarois into a mould, close it, and pack it in pounded ice and salt. In about two hours time or more, dip the mould in tepid water, wipe it, and turn the bavarois out on a glass or fancy dish, and serve.
A gelatin-set fruit cream from the Waldorf's pastry side, written for a kitchen with an ice house rather than a refrigerator. Most of the work of translating it is in the setting agent and the chilling.
- Cook the pineapple, alwaysFresh pineapple contains bromelain, which breaks down gelatin and will leave the cream a soupy mess. Stewing the fruit as directed destroys the enzyme, so do not shortcut by folding raw pineapple or raw juice into the finished bavarois.
- IsinglassIsinglass is a gelatin made from fish swim bladders, sturgeon especially, and is hard to come by for cooking today, though it is still sold for brewing and wine fining. Half an ounce is about 14 g; roughly 2 envelopes of powdered gelatin (about 4 1/2 tsp) or 6-7 sheets is a workable substitute, bloomed in the water before it goes near heat.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone and is simply granulated sugar today. Eight ounces by weight is a generous cup, which is a lot against one pineapple; scale back if your fruit is very ripe.
- TeacupfulA teacupful was reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 6 fl oz, so half a teacupful is somewhere around 1/4 to 1/3 cup of water. It is only there to keep the fruit from catching and to dissolve the setting agent.
- Preserving pan and hair sieveUse a wide, heavy-bottomed saucepan so the moisture reduces evenly. A hair sieve was a fine horsehair mesh; a fine nylon or stainless sieve or a food mill gives the same smooth purée. Press hard and scrape the underside.
- Moderate fireLow to medium heat, about 15-20 minutes, with steady stirring. Fruit and sugar at this ratio scorch quickly and a burnt note will carry through the whole cream.
- The point of settingThe purée must be cold and just beginning to thicken to the consistency of raw egg white before the cream goes in. Too warm and the cream melts and separates into layers; too far gone and it sets in lumps you cannot fold out.
- Ice and saltPacked ice and coarse salt drops well below freezing, and the original relies on it to set the mould fast. A refrigerator does the same job in 4-6 hours; do not use a freezer, which will crystallise the cream.
- Unmoulding and yieldA brief dip in tepid water, three or four seconds, then wipe and invert. Longer and the surface slumps. The recipe gives no yield, but a pint of cream plus the purée should roughly fill a 1 1/2 quart mould and serve about eight.
A bavarois, or Bavarian cream, is a purée or custard set with gelatin and lightened with whipped cream, a form codified in French professional kitchens in the early nineteenth century and generally traced to Carême's generation, though the connection to Bavaria itself has never been satisfactorily explained. Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf's repertoire in the 1890s, when moulded cold sweets were a standard finish to a long hotel dinner: they could be made hours ahead, they held their shape on a cold buffet, and they showed off the kitchen's ice supply. Pineapple still carried some weight as a display fruit, though by the 1890s steamship imports had brought it within reach of many New York tables, and isinglass, the fish-bladder gelatin prized for its clarity, was a favoured setting agent before commercial powdered gelatin displaced it.