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Bohemian Creams
One quart cream, two table-spoons sugar, one ounce gelatine soaked in water until dissolved; whip half the cream (rich milk may be substituted for cream) to a stiff froth; boil the other half with the sugar and a vanilla bean until a flavor is extracted (or vanilla extract may be added just after it is removed from the fire), take off the fire, add the gelatine, and when cooled a little stir in the well-beaten yolks of the four eggs. As soon as it begins to thicken, stir steadily until smooth, when add the whipped cream, beating it in lightly.. Mold and set on ice until ready to serve. To flavor with strawberries, strain two pounds berries through a colander, sweeten to taste, add to the dissolved gelatine, set on ice, and when it thickens stir until smooth, add the whipped cream as above, and mold.
To flavor with peach, boil a dozen and a half choice fruit, sweeten and strain through a colander; add the dissolved gelatine and a teacup of cream, set on ice, and when it thickens stir until smooth, add the whipped cream, and mold.
To flavor with pine-apple, cut fine, boil with half a pound pul verized sugar, strain through a colander, add the dissolved gela, tine, set on ice, and when it thickens stir until smooth, add the whipped cream, and mold. Canned pine-apples may be used instead of fresh. In all these never add whipped cream until the mass is cool and begins to thicken. -Mrs. W. R. Jones, Pittsburgh, Pa.
This is a Bavarian cream in all but name: a gelatine-set custard lightened with whipped cream, plus three fruit variations that skip the custard entirely. A few of its instructions carry more weight than the rest.
- The hinge: cool before foldingThe recipe says it twice and it is the whole technique — never add the whipped cream until the base is cool and just beginning to set. Fold into a warm base and the cream deflates into soup; wait too long and you get lumps of set gelatine streaking the mould.
- Fresh pineapple and gelatineRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatine and leaves the cream permanently slack. Boiling the fruit with the sugar, as directed, destroys the enzyme — do not shortcut it with uncooked fruit. Canned pineapple is already heat-treated and is safe on that count.
- One ounce of gelatineAn ounce is roughly four modern quarter-ounce envelopes, about 3 tablespoons of powder. Nineteenth-century gelatine varied in strength more than today's; a full ounce set into a quart of cream will give a firm, sliceable mould of the sort meant to be turned out, not a spoonable mousse. Reduce it if you want something softer.
- The eggsFour yolks, though the ingredient line never mentions the eggs. They are stirred in after the cream has come off the fire and cooled a little, and are never returned to the heat, so they are warmed by residual heat at best. If that concerns you, hold the mixture over low heat until it coats a spoon (around 170-175F), or use pasteurized eggs.
- "Set on ice"Literally, set the vessel in or on ice. Chill in the refrigerator instead — allow roughly 20 minutes for the fruit bases to reach the thickening point, and several hours or overnight for the moulded cream to set through.
- Straining through a colanderHere it means pushing the cooked fruit through. Use a fine-mesh strainer or food mill to catch peach skins and pineapple fibre; a blender alone will not remove them.
- Peaches by number"A dozen and a half choice fruit" means eighteen peaches. Modern supermarket peaches are often larger than their nineteenth-century equivalents; go by volume rather than count.
- The fruit versions have no custardRead closely: the strawberry, peach and pineapple variations use fruit, gelatine and whipped cream only — no eggs, no boiled cream base. They are lighter and set less richly than the vanilla original, and they are the easier place to start.
- YieldA quart of cream, half of it whipped, makes roughly a quart and a half of mixture; use a two-quart mould, serving ten to twelve. Oil the mould lightly and dip it briefly in warm water to turn out.
"Bohemian cream" was one of several nineteenth-century American names for what French cookery called a bavarois and English books usually printed as Bavarian cream — a custard set with isinglass or gelatine and lightened with whipped cream. The names of central European regions attached themselves to these moulds fairly loosely, and Bohemian, Bavarian and Russian creams often describe near-identical mixtures from one book to the next. What made the dish practical was commercially prepared gelatine, increasingly available through the second half of the century, which spared the cook the business of boiling calves' feet or shaving isinglass — along with a reliable supply of ice, which is what "set on ice" assumes. The recipe is credited by name and town to Mrs. W. R. Jones of Pittsburgh, in the manner of compiled cookbooks assembled from contributed recipes.