Frangipan
The kind commonly used by bakers for filling cream puffs, etc. 1 quart of milk. 8 ounces of white sugar. 4 ounces of flour. 5 eggs. Pinch of salt. 1 ounce of butter. 1 tablespoonful of extract of lemon. Set the milk and butter on to boil. Mix the flour and sugar together while dry, very thoroughly, then sprinkle them in the milk rapidly and keep beating till it is well up to the boiling point again. It is worthless if in the least scorched. Move it to the side of the range and stir in the five eggs, cover and let simmer slowly for twenty minutes, or till well cooked. Flavor after cooling.
EXTRA TOUCHES.--Three ounces of fresh butter lightly browned in a frying pan over the fire and then added to the pastry-cream, gives it richness, and flavor of nuts. Almond macaroons may be broken into the milk when first put on to boil.
Thick whipped cream can be lightly stirred into the pastry-cream when the articles to be filled are for immediate use.
When the pastry-cream is for cream pie, or tourte de frangipane; or for fauchonettes, which are small, deep tarts nearly filled with it and meringued on top like lemon pies; or for cream cake, the difference required is only to use 8 yolks instead of the 5 whole eggs, and make the cream as usual. The juice of a lemon may be added for pies. The whites of the eggs make the meringue.
This is crème pâtissière under its older American bakeshop name — a flour-thickened pastry cream stiff enough to hold in a puff. The proportions are sound; the method and the timing are where nineteenth-century practice and modern practice part company.
- The hinge: never let it scorchThe book is right that a scorched pastry cream is worthless — the burnt taste goes right through it and cannot be strained out. Use a heavy-bottomed pan, keep a flat-ended whisk or spatula moving across the whole base and into the corners, and drop the heat the moment it thickens.
- Weights, not cupsThe ounces here are weight: 8 oz sugar is a generous cup, 4 oz flour a scant cup, 1 oz butter is 2 tablespoons. A quart of milk is 4 cups. Weighing the flour matters more than the sugar, since a heavy cup makes the cream pasty.
- Temper the eggsBeating five whole eggs into a pan of near-boiling starch off the heat will curdle them unless you work fast. Whisk a ladleful of the hot mixture into the beaten eggs first, then return the lot to the pan over low heat, whisking without pause.
- Twenty minutes is far too longOnce the eggs are in and the cream returns to a lazy bubble, one to two minutes of hard whisking is enough — that cooks out the raw flour and deactivates the enzyme in egg yolk that would otherwise thin the starch later. A covered twenty-minute simmer on a wood range meant gentle residual heat; on a gas or induction burner it means scrambled eggs or a scorched base.
- A tablespoon of lemon extractBottled lemon extracts vary a great deal in strength, and a full tablespoon may be more than you want. Start with a teaspoon, or the zest of two lemons steeped in the milk, and taste. Flavour after cooling, as instructed — volatile oils blow off in a hot pan.
- Cooling and keepingPour it out into a shallow dish, press plastic wrap or buttered paper directly on the surface to stop a skin, and chill quickly. Pastry cream is a custard: refrigerate within an hour and use inside three days. Whisk it smooth before filling anything.
- The yolk versionEight yolks in place of five whole eggs gives the richer, softer cream wanted for tarts and pies. Reserve the whites for the meringue as directed — for fauchonettes, meringue over a cold filling and bake in a moderate oven only until the peaks colour; the book itself specifies no temperature.
- The browned butterThree ounces of butter taken to the hazelnut stage and stirred in warm is genuinely worth doing; it is beurre noisette, and it gives the nuttiness the note promises. Add it to the finished cream, not to the boiling milk.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half of finished cream — enough for roughly three dozen cream puffs, or two nine-inch tarts.
The name is a leftover from French pastry, where frangipane properly means an almond cream, and is generally traced to a Frangipani family of Rome associated with a perfumed glove scent that was said to smell of bitter almond. By the time this book was written the word had drifted in American bakeshops to mean the plain flour-and-egg pastry cream used to fill puffs and éclairs — hence the author's careful opening line, "the kind commonly used by bakers." The almond connection survives only in the optional macaroons crumbled into the milk, and in the tourte de frangipane he names among the uses. That drift is typical of the trade literature of the period.