Home › The Principles of Cookery › Vacherin for Sweet Creams
Vacherin for Sweet Creams
Take half a pound of sweet almonds and half a pound of white sugar. Blanch, peel, and pound the almonds, add the sugar, and moisten the mixture to a stiff paste with white of egg. Sprinkle some powdered sugar on a pastry-board, and roll the almond paste upon it a quarter of an inch thick. Take a plain mould about six inches in diameter, line the sides with a band of paste one and a half inches deep, and join the ends securely together with white of egg. Stamp out a round of the paste a little larger than the bottom of the mould. Bake both in a gentle oven. When the paste is dry take it out of the oven, remove the band from the mould, and stick it upon the round. Put the case again in the oven, let it remain till it becomes slightly coloured, then let it get quite cold. When wanted, fill it with any nicely-flavoured whipped cream, piling the cream as high as possible.
This is a marzipan case built in two pieces and cemented together with egg white — the hinge is drying it slowly rather than baking it, so the ring holds its shape and stays crisp until the cream goes in.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf a pound each of almonds and sugar is 8 oz (225 g) of each, roughly 1 1/2 cups blanched almonds and 1 generous cup sugar. Expect to need one to two egg whites to bring it to a stiff, non-sticky paste; add it a teaspoon at a time.
- Almonds"Sweet almonds" is simply the ordinary edible almond, distinguished in Victorian shops from bitter almonds. Blanched slivered or whole almonds ground in a food processor with some of the sugar are less likely to turn oily; pounding in a mortar was the original method and gives a slightly coarser texture.
- "A gentle oven"Read this as 275-300F (140-150C), and lower rather than higher. The first bake is a drying operation — the paste should firm through without taking colour at all. The second, brief bake to "slightly coloured" can go a little hotter, around 325F, but watch it, as almond paste scorches quickly.
- The mouldA plain mould here means a straight-sided ring or tin about 6 inches across, used as a former only. Line the outside or inside of the ring with baking parchment so the band can be lifted away cleanly.
- Band and baseRoll the paste on sugar, not flour, and cut the band 1 1/2 inches deep and long enough to overlap slightly. Cut the base disc a little wider than the ring, as the original says, so the join sits on solid ground and the finished case has a small lip.
- JoiningEgg white is the glue and the only glue. Brush it thinly on both surfaces, press firmly, and return the assembled case to the oven so the seam sets hard; a wet join left unbaked will collapse under the weight of cream.
- Filling and timingFill only at the moment of serving. Sweetened whipped cream flavoured with vanilla, coffee, chocolate or a liqueur would answer to "nicely-flavoured"; once in place the moisture will begin to soften the almond case.
- YieldA 6-inch case piled high should serve six or so. The case itself, kept dry in a tin, will probably hold for a few days before filling.
Vacherin takes its name from the Alpine cheese of the same name, the round wheel-and-band shape of the pastry case being generally said to have suggested the comparison. In French pâtisserie the vacherin is more often built from rings of dry meringue stacked and cemented with meringue or royal icing; the almond-paste version in Cassell's belongs to the same family of edible containers that let a cook serve whipped cream, ice or fruit fool standing free on a dish without a mould or glass. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s and reissued in expanded form for decades afterwards, is thick with such constructions — cases of nougat, of pastry, of spun sugar — and a household with a cool larder and a steady low oven could make the shell days ahead and fill it at the last minute.