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Chocolate Pastry Cream
For feuchonettes au choclat, eclairs au chocolat, etc. 1 quart of milk. 8 ounces of sugar. 4 ounces of flour. 2 ounces of grated chocolate. 2 ounces of butter. 4 yolks of eggs. 1 tablespoonful of vanilla extract.
Boil the milk, butter and grated chocolate to gether. Mix sugar and flour dry and beat them into the boiling milk. Stir awhile to prevent burning, then set the saucepan on the side of the range and stir in the yolks, after beating them with a spoonful of milk. Let cook till well thickened. Flavor with the vanilla when cold.
A flour-thickened pastry cream on the classic French model, scaled for a bakery rather than a household. The proportions still work; only the equipment language has aged.
- YieldA quart of milk plus the other additions gives something over four cups of finished cream — enough to fill a large batch of eclairs. Halve or quarter it for home baking; the method is unchanged.
- The chocolate"Grated chocolate" in an American bakery book of this era usually indicates unsweetened block chocolate rather than eating chocolate. Use 2 oz unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped fine. Modern semisweet or a 70% bar will work but adds sugar and cocoa butter, so cut the sugar by an ounce or so.
- "The side of the range"A coal range had a cooler edge for gentle simmering. Translate this as reducing the burner to low before the yolks go in — hot enough to keep the cream cooking, not hot enough to scramble them.
- TemperingBeating the yolks with a spoonful of milk is the whole of the original's tempering. Ladle a cup of the hot mixture into the beaten yolks in a thin stream, whisking, then return the lot to the pan. Cheap insurance against curdled specks.
- Cook the flour outFour ounces of flour to a quart is a firm, pipeable cream, and it needs to reach a full lazy boil for a minute or two after the yolks go in or it will taste of raw starch. Flour-thickened creams tolerate that boiling better than cornstarch ones, which can thin if overcooked.
- Whisk, do not stir"Stir awhile to prevent burning" understates it. Beating dry flour and sugar into boiling milk lumps readily; use a whisk and keep it moving into the corners of the pan, where scorching starts.
- Vanilla when coldAdding the extract off the heat avoids driving off the volatile flavour and alcohol. In practice, stir it in once the cream has cooled well below a simmer rather than waiting for it to go fully cold and stiff.
- Cooling and keepingPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface to stop a skin forming, chill promptly, and use within three days. Beat it smooth with a spatula before filling; it sets to a sliceable block.
- Fanchonnettes"Feuchonettes" is the book's spelling of fanchonnettes — small tartlets filled with pastry cream and finished with meringue.
Pastry cream thickened with flour rather than cornstarch is the older French practice, and this recipe reads as a straight transplant of the professional crème pâtissière into an American bakeshop, down to the untranslated French on the first line. Books of this kind appear to have been aimed at the working pastry cook rather than the housewife: quantities start at a quart, the chocolate is assumed to be the unsweetened block, and the writer expects the reader to know what an eclair and a fanchonnette look like without being told. Chocolate as a flavouring for creams and fillings is generally said to have become routine in American bakeries over the course of the nineteenth century — an ounce or two grated into a base of milk, sugar, flour and yolks was the standard way of getting it into a pastry.