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Flan de Fraises à la Parisienne
(A Strawberry Sweet, Cold.) Ingredients.
One pound of firm ripe Strawberries.
Three ounces of castor Sugar.
About half a pound of Short Crust.
The whites of two Eggs.
Line a pastry ring (six inches in diameter) with the short crust, place it on a baking-sheet, fill it up with dried peas or rice, and bake it a delicate brown in a moderate oven and remove the peas.
Wipe and prepare sufficient strawberries to fill the ring; arrange the fruit in one layer closely in the baked crust, put it in the oven, and when nearly baked add about one ounce of castor sugar to the fruit.
Beat up the whites of eggs to a stiff froth, mix with castor sugar, spread the meringue mixture quickly over the surface, and brown slightly in the oven, Serve cold,
A blind-baked short crust shell, a single close-packed layer of strawberries, and a meringue lid browned just enough to set. The whole thing lives or dies on keeping the pastry dry.
- The hinge: keep the base crispStrawberries throw a good deal of juice once heated, and a baked shell will soften as it stands. Bake the crust thoroughly, and keep the fruit's time in the oven short — the recipe bakes the fruit only until "nearly baked" before the sugar goes on, not down to a stewed filling.
- Pastry ringA 6-inch flan ring: a bottomless metal band set on a baking sheet, so the pastry sides bake against the metal and the base against the tray. A shallow 6-inch loose-bottomed tart tin does the same job.
- Oven temperaturesA moderate oven is usually taken as about 350F/175C for the blind baking; allow roughly 20–25 minutes with the peas in and another 5–10 with them out, judging by colour. The recipe gives no setting for the meringue beyond "brown slightly in the oven" — a hotter oven for a few minutes will colour it, but watch it constantly.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or baker's sugar. It dissolves fast in egg white, which matters for a meringue folded and spread "quickly" rather than beaten at length. Granulated will leave the meringue gritty and weeping.
- Short crust quantityHalf a pound means half a pound of made pastry, not of flour — about 8 oz/225 g total, comfortably more than a 6-inch ring needs. Roll thin and keep the trimmings.
- The meringue proportionsTwo whites will take about 2 oz of the 3 oz of sugar, leaving roughly 1 oz for the fruit as the recipe directs. Beat to stiff peaks, then add the sugar gradually or the foam collapses.
- "Serve cold"Cold, but not chilled overnight: a meringue over juicy fruit begins to bead and slump after a few hours. Make it in the morning for the same afternoon.
- YieldA 6-inch flan gives about four modest portions, or six if it follows several other courses.
The flan ring — a bottomless band that produces a straight-sided open tart — was standard equipment in professional pastry work. "À la Parisienne" in books of this type is less a fixed formula than a signal of the polished, restaurant-trained style that dominated high-class British cookery — French names on English fruit. Strawberries themselves were a short-season luxury before refrigerated transport, and a dish that shows them whole, in a single visible layer under a thin veil of meringue, is deliberately displaying the quality of the fruit rather than disguising it. Meringue lids of this kind, browned briefly at the last moment, were a common Victorian way of finishing a fruit tart without a heavy top crust.