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Bavarian Vanilla Cream
This is peculiar to the Tyrol and Black Forest. Warm but do not boil 3/4 pint of milk, mix the yolks of 3 eggs and 3 ounces of sugar, add to the milk, stir well, then having dissolved 1/2 ounce gelatine in the warm milk, stir until thick, but do not boil it. Add a spoonful of vanilla, strain it, and add 1/2 pint of whipped cream. Pour into a mould, and serve with strawberry sauce, made by cooking a cup of fresh berries, or canned ones, with sugar to sweeten, the juice of 1/2 a lemon, and sufficient hot water to make a thick syrup when strained. Cool it, and serve both very cold.
A classic bavarois: an egg custard set with gelatine and lightened with whipped cream. The whole recipe hinges on the custard, which must thicken without ever reaching a boil.
- The hinge: custard temperatureCook the yolk, sugar and milk mixture over low heat, stirring constantly, until it coats the back of a spoon — 170–180F on a thermometer. Above about 185F the yolks curdle and no amount of straining will recover the texture.
- Imperial measuresIf the pints here are imperial, 3/4 pint of milk is 15 fl oz, a generous 1 3/4 US cups, and the 1/2 pint of cream is 10 fl oz, or 1 1/4 cups. (The recipe's 'cup of berries' and 'canned' point the other way, so the measure is not certain.) Measured as US pints the result is slightly firmer but still works.
- GelatineHalf an ounce is 14 g, or two standard 1/4 oz envelopes of powdered gelatine. Sprinkle it over a few tablespoons of cold water and let it swell for five minutes before stirring it into the warm custard; dropping dry powder into hot milk gives you threads that never dissolve.
- "A spoonful of vanilla"Most likely vanilla extract or a vanilla-sugar syrup rather than a modern paste. A tablespoon is a lot by modern strength — 1 to 2 teaspoons of good extract is closer to the intended flavour.
- Folding in the creamStrain the custard, then cool it until it is cold and just beginning to thicken at the edges before folding in cream whipped to soft peaks. Fold into warm custard and the cream deflates; wait too long and the gelatine sets in lumps.
- UnmouldingRinse the mould with cold water or brush it very lightly with a neutral oil. Chill at least 4 to 6 hours, then dip the mould in hot water for a few seconds and invert onto a cold plate.
- The strawberry sauceSimmer the berries with sugar and the lemon juice only until they collapse, five minutes or so, then strain and thin with hot water to a pourable syrup. Prolonged boiling turns fresh strawberries dull and jammy.
- YieldEnough for a 1 1/2-pint mould, serving six.
Bavarian cream — crème bavaroise in French kitchens, Bayerische Creme in German ones — is a cold custard set with gelatine and enriched with whipped cream, and its name is generally traced to French cooks working for the Wittelsbach court of Bavaria in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a story repeated more often than it is documented. Carême recorded several bavarois formulas, and by the time this book appeared the dish was a fixture of the international dessert repertoire rather than anything regional. The claim that it is "peculiar to the Tyrol and Black Forest" probably records where the author happened to eat it. What is genuinely of its period is the gelatine: commercially prepared sheet and powdered gelatine had replaced the laborious business of boiling calves' feet or clarifying isinglass, which is precisely what made moulded creams like this one a practical dessert for an ordinary household rather than a professional kitchen.