Bohemian Cream
Take one quart of cream, two tablespoonfuls of sugar and three-quarters of an ounce of Knox' gelatine dissolved; whip one-half the cream to a stiff froth; boil the other half with the sugar; vanilla extract may be added. Just after it is removed from the fire, add the gelatine and when cooled a little, stir in the well beaten yolks of four eggs. As soon as it begins to thicken, stir steadily until smooth, when add the whipped cream, beating it lightly. Mould and set on ice until ready to serve.
This is a Bavarian cream by another name, and the method has one structural flaw that cannot be worked around within the recipe as printed.
- The egg yolks are never cookedThe yolks go into cream that has been taken off the heat and allowed to cool "a little," and the mixture is then moulded and chilled. Nothing returns it to the stove, so there is no point at which the eggs are held at a temperature that would deal with Salmonella; the thickening described is as much the gelatine setting as the custard cooking. Use a current Bavarian cream recipe that cooks the custard base to a stated temperature, or one built on pasteurised eggs.
- "Boil the other half"Even setting the eggs aside, a boiled cream base is against modern practice — scalding is what is wanted. A rolling boil in a quart of cream reduces it unpredictably and can throw the gelatine ratio off.
- Knox' gelatine, three-quarters of an ounceCharles Knox's granulated gelatine was a new convenience product of the 1890s, sold in boxes of envelopes. Three-quarters of an ounce is roughly 21 g, or about three modern quarter-ounce envelopes -- a firm, sliceable set for a quart of liquid rather than the barely-standing spoon dessert now preferred.
- "Dissolved"The original assumes the reader knows to soften the gelatine in cold water first and only then dissolve it. Granulated gelatine tipped dry into hot cream lumps immediately and the lumps never recover.
- "Set on ice"This means an ice chest or a tub of ice, not a freezer. The intent is a steady cold hold, not freezing; a gelatine cream that freezes weeps badly on thawing.
- YieldA quart of cream, half of it whipped, makes something over a quart of finished cream. The recipe states neither a yield nor a mould size.
"Bohemian cream" was one of several nineteenth-century names for what most cookbooks called Bavarian cream: a cooked custard set with gelatine and lightened with whipped cream, unmoulded and served cold. The style is generally traced to French pastry practice, where bavarois appears in the early nineteenth-century repertoire, and the geographic names attached to these creams -- Bavarian, Bohemian, Russian -- were largely decorative rather than descriptive of any regional origin. What marks the recipe as post-1890 is the brand name in the ingredient list. Earlier, gelatine could mean boiling down calves' feet or soaking isinglass, though packaged sheet and shred gelatines were also sold through the nineteenth century; pre-granulated packaged gelatine, of which Knox was the best known, is generally credited with putting moulded creams within reach of a cook without a kitchen staff.