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Dessert

Bavaroise

A chilled custard dessert made with double cream, rum, gelatin, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Bavaroise

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Whip the cream to stiff peaks.

  2. Quickly mix in the rum, dissolved gelatin, and sugar until thoroughly combined.

Set the bavarois

  1. Pour the mixture into a mold.

  2. Refrigerate until set.

  3. In warm weather, embed the mold in ice.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Rum + sugartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Cream + rumtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Double cream
Whipped into stiff peaks, its trapped air gives the dessert a light, airy texture.
Gelatine
Sets the liquid mixture as it chills, so the bavarois holds its shape when unmolded.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the richness of the cream and the rum.
Rum or curaçao or maraschino
Adds aroma and flavour to the cream mixture.

The step that matters

Quickly mix in the rum, dissolved gelatin, and sugar. Gelatine begins to set as it cools, and it can form lumps or strands if it meets cold cream unevenly. Mixing quickly and thoroughly spreads it evenly before it firms, so the set is smooth and uniform.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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