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Almond Darioles
Beat two ounces of fresh butter to a cream. Mix with it the same weight of flour, a heaped table-spoonful of sugar, half a pint of milk and half a pint of cream, four well-whisked eggs, and a little chopped lemon-peel. Mix all well together, and then add, a drop at a time, a little essence of almond, to suit the taste; too much of the essence will make the dish disagreeable. Stir over the fire for ten minutes. Line dariole moulds with tartlet paste, fill them three parts with the batter, and bake in a quick oven until the pastry is sufficiently ready. Turn the darioles out of the moulds, strew sifted sugar over them, and serve. Time to bake, about twenty minutes. Sufficient to fill about half a dozen dariole moulds. Probable cost, 1s.8d.
A Victorian small custard-tart baked in individual moulds. The batter is cooked twice — thickened on the stove, then baked in pastry — and the stovetop stage is where it can go wrong.
- The hinge: gentle heatFour whisked eggs go into the pan before it ever sees the fire, so ten minutes of hard stirring over a brisk flame will scramble them. Use low heat, stir constantly with a wooden spoon, and stop as soon as the mixture coats the spoon; it should thicken like a loose pastry cream, never bubble.
- Imperial pintsThis is a British book, so half a pint of milk and half a pint of cream mean 10 fl oz each — about 1 1/4 US cups apiece, or one imperial pint (about 2 1/2 US cups) of liquid in total. That is a great deal of liquid against 2 oz (about 1/2 cup) of flour, which is why the mixture is set on the stove first.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400–425F as a modern approximation. The pastry has to colour and set in the twenty minutes given; a cooler oven leaves the shells pale and soggy under the custard.
- Dariole mouldsSmall straight-sided or slightly tapered metal moulds; sizes varied, and the quantity here (a pint of liquid plus four eggs across about six moulds, filled only three parts) implies fairly deep ones. Deep muffin tins or individual popover cups stand in; fill three parts, no more.
- Butter "beaten to a cream"Room-temperature butter creamed until pale, then the flour worked in — effectively a beurre manié that disperses into the milk without lumps. Cold butter straight from the fridge will not combine.
- Essence of almondNineteenth-century almond essence was often genuinely bitter-almond based and could be considerably stronger than modern extract. Modern almond extract is milder but still assertive: start with 1/4 teaspoon for this quantity and taste. The warning about "too much" being disagreeable still holds.
- Chopped lemon-peelZest of half a lemon, chopped fine or grated. Avoid the white pith, which turns bitter in a sweet custard.
- Turning outButter the moulds under the pastry and let the darioles settle two or three minutes before unmoulding; straight from the oven the custard is too fluid to hold. Dust with icing sugar and serve warm. Six moulds serves six as a small dessert.
- Cost1s 8d for the batch — a shilling and eightpence, given for a housekeeper pricing dishes against her weekly budget, not a measurement you need.
A dariole is a small pastry case baked in its own mould, a term in English cookery since at least the fifteenth century and borrowed from the French; by the Victorian period the moulds themselves — little tapered tin cylinders — were standard batterie de cuisine, used for savoury as well as sweet fillings. Cassell's places this among the almond-flavoured entries that fill out its dessert chapters, where almond essence is often said to have done the work that expensive ground almonds once had: a few drops were held to give the taste of a rich marchpane confection at a fraction of the cost, which is very much the logic of a dictionary of cookery aimed at middle-class households counting pence. The two-stage method — thicken on the stove, finish in the pastry — is the same principle behind flan pâtissier and the older English "custard tart," and is generally explained by the tendency of a raw liquid custard poured into raw pastry to soak into the base.