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Vanilla Cream
Pour one and one-half pints of milk into a saucepan with half a vanilla bean, and boil it; then remove the saucepan from the fire, put the lid on and allow the vanilla to soak for an hour. Beat the yolks of eight eggs together with three-fourths of a pound of sugar, then stir it into the milk, and keep stirring over a clear fire until the custard thickens, but it must not be allowed to boil. Take the custard off the fire and stir it for a few minutes longer. Soak one and one-half ounces of gelatine in cold water for twenty minutes, then drain and mix it in the hot custard. When the gelatine has dissolved strain the custard through a pointed strainer into another stewpan, which place on the top of some rough ice; stir the contents till it commences to set. Whip one and one-fourth pints of cream to a stiff froth, remove the stewpan from the ice and stir it in. Fill a cylinder-mould with the cream, pack it in pounded ice, and leave till the cream is set. Dip the mould into warm water, wipe it, turn the contents out onto a dish, and serve.
This is a classic Bavarian cream — vanilla custard set with gelatine and lightened with whipped cream. Two things decide whether it works: the custard must never boil, and the gelatine quantity needs judgement.
- The custard is the hingeCook the yolk-and-milk mixture only until it coats a spoon, 175–180F on a thermometer. At a boil the yolks curdle and no amount of straining recovers the texture.
- Gelatine, and why less is betterAn ounce and a half of gelatine for roughly two quarts of custard and cream reflects the weaker, less consistent gelatine available when the book was written. Common domestic powdered gelatine today runs around 225 bloom; three-quarters of an ounce (roughly three envelopes, 21 g) gives a cream that stands unmoulded without turning rubbery. Bloom it in cold water, then stir into the hot custard off the heat until fully dissolved.
- SugarThree-quarters of a pound is about 1 2/3 cups — very sweet by current taste. Between one-half and two-thirds of that amount still sets and unmoulds properly, since the gelatine does the structural work.
- Rough ice and pounded iceCracked or crushed ice for chilling; the recipe sets the pan on the first and packs the finished mould in the second. Cool the custard over ice, stirring, until it just begins to thicken at the edges — fold in the whipped cream at that point. Too warm and the cream deflates; too cold and the mixture sets in streaks.
- Pointed strainerA chinois or any fine conical sieve. Straining catches the vanilla bean debris and any threads of set egg.
- The mouldA cylinder mould is a plain straight-sided tin. Any 2-quart mould works; refrigerate four to six hours rather than packing it in ice. Dip briefly in warm water, wipe, and invert.
- CreamWhip heavy cream to soft-to-medium peaks, not the "stiff froth" of a hand whisk era — over-whipped cream folds in as lumps.
- YieldRoughly two quarts of finished cream, serving ten to twelve.
Vanilla cream of this construction is the bavarois of French professional kitchens — a stirred custard bound with gelatine and enriched with whipped cream — and it was among the most reliable banquet sweets of the late nineteenth century, since it could be moulded hours ahead and held on ice. Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf's working repertoire in the 1890s, when hotel kitchens depended on natural-ice cellars: the instructions to set the pan on "rough ice" and pack the mould in "pounded ice" distinguish the two words without further explanation. The name Bavarian cream is generally traced to French chefs who worked in German courts in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though the connection to Bavaria itself has never been firmly documented. The quantity of gelatine here is a reminder that isinglass and early sheet gelatine varied widely in strength.