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Strawberry Bavarois
Take one quart of freshly-picked, thoroughly ripe strawberries, mash with four tablespoonfuls of finely-powdered white sugar and pass through a rather fine sieve. Put this puree into a china basin until wanted. Now dissolve one and one-half ounces of fine isinglass in a pan with a tumbler of warm water, add one-half pound of fine sugar, and when this is all dissolved add the juice of an orange and twenty drops or so of essence of lemon. Pass through a sieve and keep on stirring it as it gets cold, adding the puree of strawberries by degrees. Place it on the ice and as it thickens mix in four tablespoonfuls of whipped cream. Pour it into a large-sized dome-shaped mould previously packed in ice. Cut a slice of Genoa-cake one inch thick, the shape of the dish, and cover it smoothly with vanilla-flavored icing. Set this and turn out the bavarois onto an ice-cold dish, taking care to place it exactly in the center. Ornament with large strawberry and angelica leaves on the top, and place strawberries with angelica leaves round the base of the dome.
A moulded fruit cream from the Waldorf's dessert repertoire, set with isinglass rather than the egg custard most bavarois recipes use. The whole thing hinges on adding the strawberry puree to the setting jelly gradually and while both are cool but still fluid.
- Isinglass to gelatinIsinglass is dried fish swim bladder, the ancestor of modern gelatin, and its setting power varied enormously by grade, so the 1.5 oz here cannot be converted with confidence. Use unflavored powdered or leaf gelatin at the strength the packet specifies for a quart of liquid, and test a spoonful on a cold plate before committing the mould.
- A tumbler of waterRoughly 8 fl oz. Bloom the gelatin in a little of it cold first, then dissolve over gentle heat with the rest; boiling weakens the set.
- Essence of lemonIn period usage this normally meant lemon oil, or a strong alcoholic solution of it, and was generally more concentrated than today's lemon extract. Twenty drops of modern extract will read as thin and alcoholic; a teaspoon of extract, or the zest of one lemon steeped in the warm syrup and strained out, gets closer.
- SugarFour tablespoons on the fruit plus half a pound in the syrup is very sweet by current taste, and it was partly there to help the texture. Cutting the syrup sugar to 4-5 oz works if the berries are ripe, but do not cut it to nothing.
- Temperature controlStir constantly as it cools so it thickens evenly rather than setting in lumps at the edge of the bowl. The whipped cream goes in only when the mixture has the body of unbeaten egg white; too warm and the cream melts out, too cool and it streaks.
- Ice, and the modern substituteA mould packed in ice is a refrigerator. Chill a 1.5-quart dome or charlotte mould, fill it, and give it 5-6 hours or overnight. To turn out, dip the mould in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto the chilled dish.
- Genoa-cakeProbably genoise, the plain whisked sponge, though 'Genoa cake' in period English usage could also mean a fruited cake. The recipe cuts a one-inch slice 'the shape of the dish', ices it with vanilla icing, and the bavarois is turned out on top of it.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, sold cut into green strips and used here as decorative leaves. Specialist confectioners still carry it; candied citrus peel or real mint leaves stand in for appearance.
- YieldEnough for roughly 8 servings. Best served the day it is made.
Bavarois, or Bavarian cream, was codified in early nineteenth-century French kitchens as a moulded cream stiffened with isinglass or gelatin, and its association with Bavaria is traditional rather than documented. Classic versions build on a cooked egg custard; this one is a bavarois aux fruits, where a sieved fruit puree does the flavoring work and whipped cream lightens the set. Isinglass, made from the swim bladders of sturgeon and long imported through the Russian trade, was the fine confectioner's setting agent of the period, prized because it clarified as well as jellied; commercial sheet and powdered gelatin displaced it in kitchens over the following decades and it survives now mainly in beer and wine fining. The recipe's assumptions about equipment place it squarely in a hotel pantry: shaved ice packed around the mould, a separate sponge base iced to order, and a garnish of candied angelica cut to look like leaves, all of it built by hand in a kitchen with time for that sort of work.