Chantilly Basket
The original Chantilly basket was a Savoy cake scooped out and filled with whipt cream. Char The idea thus started has been elaborated into a toy. First of all, a dish or mould has to be chosen, shaped like a basket. Next a syrup of sugar is boiled to crackling point. Then the mould is lined with delicate little cakesratafias the best, which are made to stick together edge to edge by being dipt in the sugar. The bottom of the dish may be lined in like manner with sponge cakes or macaroons, to absorb any liquid from the frothed cream. basket is in this way formed which may easily be removed from the mould to a proper dish, and then filled with whipt cream.
A CHANTILLY CREAM-the French name for whipt cream; but it is very absurd to give local names to a simple preparation known to all the world. When the great ones of the earth invent a good dish let them have the credit of it; but it is mere usurpation to describe whipt cream in an epithet which represents it as the peculiar property of the House of Condé.
An assembly job rather than a baking one: the whole thing hinges on sugar cooked to the crack stage, which sets hard and glues the little cakes into a self-supporting shell. Read the sugar note first.
- "Crackling point"This is the hard-crack stage, 300-310F (149-154C) on a thermometer. Below that the sugar stays tacky and the basket sags; much above it the syrup darkens and tastes burnt. Have the cakes and the oiled mould ready before the sugar comes up, as the window is short.
- Handling the hot syrupDip the edge of each cake, not your fingers. Sugar at 300F sticks to skin and keeps burning; keep a bowl of cold water beside the pan. If the syrup thickens in the pan, warm it gently rather than adding water.
- RatafiasSmall, crisp almond macaroons, roughly the size of a large coin. Modern amaretti, the hard Italian sort rather than the soft, are the closest supermarket equivalent. Older ratafias were flavoured with bitter almond or peach kernel; commercial almond extract does the same job now.
- Savoy cakeThe biscuit de Savoie, a very light whisked sponge raised on beaten eggs alone, baked in a tall fluted mould. Any plain sponge will stand in for the earlier hollowed-out version described in the first line.
- The mouldAny deep bowl, charlotte mould or basket-shaped form will serve. Brush it with a flavourless oil and line it with a sheet of parchment or foil pressed into the shape, or the caramel will weld the basket to the dish.
- Why the base is differentSponge cakes or macaroons at the bottom are there to soak up the liquid that weeps out of whipped cream as it stands, which is what the recipe means by "any liquid from the frothed cream". Skipping them is likely to leave a puddle around the caramel joints.
- Chantilly creamKettner's insists this is simply whipped cream and nothing more; the modern convention is to whip it with a little sugar and often vanilla, to soft peaks. Use cream of at least 35 per cent fat; anything labelled whipping or double will hold. Fill the basket shortly before serving.
- Damp weatherHard-crack sugar draws water from the air and goes sticky within hours. Build the basket on a dry day, and do not refrigerate it empty overnight.
Kettner's, published in 1877 and generally attributed to the journalist E. S. Dallas, is as much an opinion book as a cookery book, and the closing grumble here is characteristic. Crème Chantilly takes its name from the Château de Chantilly, seat of the Condé branch of the Bourbons, and is often said to have been created by Vatel, the great maître d'hôtel who served there in the 1660s; the attribution is traditional and not documented, and sweetened whipped cream was being eaten across Europe well before the name attached itself. What Dallas objects to is the branding, not the cream. The basket itself belongs to the nineteenth-century pâtissier's habit of building edible architecture from caramel and small dry biscuits, a lesser cousin of the pièce montée that Carême had made the showpiece of the French dessert table a generation earlier.