Home › The Principles of Cookery › Cannelons, or Fried Puffs
Cannelons, or Fried Puffs
Make some fine puff paste (see PUFF PASTE). Roll it very thin, and cut it into pieces two inches wide and six inches long. Place a tea-spoonful of jam on each piece, and fold the ends over. Press the edges (which must be brushed with water or the white of egg), and fry the cannelons in hot fat. When they begin to brown, draw them to the side of the fire, or the pastry will be sufficiently browned before it is cooked through. Drain them well by laying a piece of blotting paper on a dish before the fire, and placing them on it for a minute or two. Arrange them in a pile on a napkin. They may be made with any sort of jam, or with fresh fruit. Time to fry, ten minutes. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient, one pound of puff paste for a large dish.
A Victorian fried pastry that behaves much like a jam turnover cooked in fat rather than an oven. The whole trick is heat control: puff paste browns long before its layers are cooked through.
- Fat temperature"Draw them to the side of the fire" is the nineteenth-century way of saying lower the heat. The recipe gives no temperature; a moderate frying heat rather than a fierce one is implied, and it will need reducing once the pastry colours, or you get a dark shell over raw dough.
- Ten minutes is realTen minutes -- The stated frying time presumably covers the slow finishing at the side of the fire as well as the initial browning. Judge by feel, not colour: a finished cannelon is light and rigid, not soft or floppy in the middle.
- SealingWater or egg white on the edges is the load-bearing instruction. Jam that escapes into hot fat will spit and foul the oil, so press the seams firmly and keep the filling to a scant teaspoon, well back from the edges.
- Fresh fruitThe suggestion to use fresh fruit works only with something that will cook through in ten minutes and not release much juice. Firm stewed apple or thick fruit compote holds up; raw berries flood the pastry.
- Blotting paperKitchen paper on a rack does the same job better. The point of the warm dish before the fire is that the pastry should not steam itself soft while draining.
- Puff pasteThe book assumes you have made your own, and cross-refers to its own PUFF PASTE entry. All-butter bought puff pastry, rolled thinner than it comes, is a fair substitute.
- Yield and costOne pound of pastry cut to two by six inches gives roughly sixteen to twenty cannelons, enough for a large dish as stated. The "probable cost, 2s" is a period price and cannot be converted meaningfully.
The name is borrowed from the French cannelon, a little pipe or tube, and describes the shape rather than the filling; the same word turns up in savoury form for rolls of forcemeat or minced meat in pastry. The interest of the entry is technical: puff paste cooked in fat instead of the oven, useful where only a small quantity was wanted. Fried sweet pastries of this kind are very old and very widespread, and this is a small, neatly finished version of them, piled on a folded napkin so that any remaining grease is absorbed before the dish reaches the table.