Aux Fruits
Let there be no mystery about these. They are little individual rice cakes, but they cannot be described, only suggested, for they are but the cook's notions, and are more than chameleon like, they change shape as well as color. They are of no consequence--only passing fancies. They are unlooked for contingencies; unexpected circumstances; dernier resorts; put in to fill up the bill, to decorate and set off the row of little dinner dishes before the guest. There are cameos and there are stage scenes laid on with a whitewash brush: both are meritorous in their place. When the cook is tired of cutting out rice or farina or tapioca cakes in squares, and dishing up charlottes with a spoon, he takes some means of giving to each person an uncut, untouched and more or less decorated trifle in symmetrical shape. The main compound for these little rice shapes is already found in the rice cake plain, preceding. A suggestion of variation is found in the rice cake with fruits. Suppose you take muffin rings, brush them inside with butter, coat them with fine grated bread crumbs, fill with rice cake, bake brown and serve a green gage plum stewed in bright syrup, or half an apricot, or three red cherries with the thick juice on top. Or, instead of rings, take some handsome stamped gem pans, the deeper and more pyramidal the better, and on the buttered sides place some shapes cut with your fancy vegetable cutters out of the greenest candied citron, or watermelon rind; or else, instead of bread crumbs, use finely chopped yolks of eggs; or, instead of any of those, make some nouilles paste--which is flour moistened with yolk of egg, with a little salt and nothing else, and worked to smoothness--and cut leaves, etc., out of that. Then place rice cake round, over the patterns--a sort of wall or casing--and inside fill with preserved fruit, jam or conserve. After baking these may be turned out, glazed with yolk of egg and milk or sugar, and quickly browned again. Sometimes little rice cakes, not sweetened, are baked in the tiniest gem pans holding scarce a tablespoonful, and are served as decorations of entrees, and with fish.
This is a set of variations rather than a fixed formula, and it depends entirely on a base the author gives elsewhere: a stiff, cooked sweet rice pudding firm enough to hold a moulded shape. Everything else here is decoration.
- The hinge: the rice must be stiffThe "rice cake plain" being referenced is not printed here, but whatever its exact composition it has to be thick enough to hold a shape. If the mixture is loose enough to pour, the moulds will not turn out and the fruit-filled versions will collapse. Cook it thick, then cool it before filling the tins.
- Muffin ringsThese were plain metal bands set on a greased baking sheet, not the connected muffin tins sold today. Straight-sided crumpet or English muffin rings work, or use individual dariole moulds or ramekins; a standard muffin tin gives a shallower, less handsome shape than the "deeper and more pyramidal" gem pans the author prefers.
- Gem pansGem pans were made both in cast iron and in stamped tin (the author here says "stamped"), with cups deeper and narrower than modern muffin cups. Small brioche or savarin moulds are the closest modern equivalent for the moulded, patterned effect described.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. These are already-cooked mixtures that need setting and colouring rather than baking through, so a moderate oven is enough, with the final egg-and-milk glaze browned quickly in a hotter oven or under the broiler. Go by colour rather than a set time.
- Nouilles pasteThis is simply egg noodle dough: flour, egg yolk and salt, no water, worked smooth. Rolled paper-thin and cut into leaves, it lines the mould as an edible stencil. Roll it as thin as you can or it stays pale and leathery where it touches the tin.
- Candied citron and watermelon rindCitron here is the thick candied peel of the citron fruit, sold in blocks in older shops and now usually only around the winter holidays; candied angelica, candied lime peel or green candied cherries give the same green cut-out. Candied watermelon rind is still made in the American South and in Eastern European shops.
- Green gage plumsGreengages are a small green-gold dessert plum, in season only briefly in late summer. Any stewed plum held in a clear, well-reduced syrup does the job; the text also offers half an apricot or three cherries with thick juice.
- Yield and serviceNo quantity is given for the base mixture, so how many moulds it fills depends on the batch. The unsweetened version, baked in moulds "holding scarce a tablespoonful," is a garnish set around a platter, not a dessert.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for hotel and restaurant cooks in the American Midwest in the 1880s and 90s, and this passage shows the working end of that trade: a chef facing a long table of small dinner sweets who needs each guest to receive something whole and untouched rather than a spoonful scraped from a pan. "Aux fruits" is kitchen French of the period, when American hotel menus were written in French whether or not the cook spoke it, and the dish belongs to a large family of nineteenth-century moulded rice and farina entremets descended from the French gateau de riz. The frank admission that these are "passing fancies" and "dernier resorts" is characteristic of Whitehead, who tended to explain the reasoning of the professional kitchen rather than merely dictate quantities. The unsweetened miniatures served with fish and entrees reflect the older practice, now largely gone, of using rice and farina shapes as structural garnish on a platter.