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Cream, Patissiere
Beat one ounce of fine flour very smoothly and gradually with three well-beaten eggs, and add, a little at a time, a pint of boiling milk, or cream and milk, or cream only. Sweeten it with some lumps of sugar which have been rubbed on fresh lemon-rind, and heat the mixture over the fire, stirring all the time, until it thickens; but it must not boil. This cream is used by the French instead of our cold custard, and is very good made as above, but an ounce and a half of crushed ratafias, or a little brandy, will improve it, and it may then be used for tartlets, cannelons, small vol-au-vents, etc. Sufficient for one pint and a half. Probable cost, 8d., made with milk.
A very early English rendering of crème pâtissière, thinner and less stable than the pastry cream a modern cook expects. Two things need adjusting: the flour ratio and the instruction not to boil.
- The instruction that matters most"It must not boil" is inherited from plain egg custard, where boiling curdles. In a flour- or starch-thickened cream the opposite is true: it needs to reach a full simmer for a minute, stirring hard, to gelatinise the flour and destroy the amylase in the egg that otherwise thins the finished cream on standing. Held below boiling it will thicken and then slacken again in the fridge.
- MeasuresA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, roughly 570 ml. One ounce of flour is about 28 g and three eggs about 150 g without shell. The yield of "one pint and a half" is about 850 ml, enough to fill 20-24 small tartlets.
- Flour ratio28 g of flour to 570 ml of liquid gives a pouring cream, not a piping one. Modern pastry cream runs 45-60 g of flour or cornflour per 500 ml of milk. If you want it to hold a shape in vol-au-vents, use double the flour given.
- Sugar and lemonRubbing loaf sugar on the zest is the old way of making what is now called oleo-saccharum: the lump abrades the peel and takes up the oil. Finely grated zest steeped in the hot milk for ten minutes, then strained out, does the same job. The recipe gives no sugar quantity; 75-100 g is right for this volume.
- RatafiasRatafia biscuits were small hard almond macaroons, close to Italian amaretti. Amaretti crushed to crumbs, about 40 g, is the nearest substitute; almond extract is not, since the biscuit also adds body.
- Method in practiceWhisk flour, eggs and sugar to a smooth paste first, then add the boiling milk in a thin stream while whisking, return to the pan and cook through. Pass the finished cream through a sieve and press cling film onto the surface as it cools to stop a skin forming.
- CannelonsCannelons were rolls or horns of puff pastry, usually formed round a metal tube or cylinder and filled once cold. Fill any pastry case only shortly before serving; the cream softens crisp pastry within an hour or two.
- KeepingOnce cooled, refrigerate and use within two days. Cassell's gives no storage advice.
The note that it is "used by the French instead of our cold custard" tells you how new the thing still felt to an English kitchen when Cassell's was compiled. Crème pâtissière is the flour-thickened member of the French custard family codified in nineteenth-century professional pastry work, and its purpose is structural: unlike a boiled custard it can sit inside a tartlet or a vol-au-vent without soaking through or sliding out. The vocabulary of the last sentence, cannelons and vol-au-vents alongside the ratafia biscuits, marks this as a recipe written for the confectioner's end of the household repertoire. The costing in pence, 8d. a pint and a half, is a standing feature of Cassell's and reflects a period when a housekeeper could be told what a dish ought to cost before she began.