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Individual Puff Puddings
First make the frangipane pastry cream: 1 quart of milk; 2 ounces of butter; 4 ounces of flour; 8 ounces of sugar; 5 eggs. Mix sugar and flour dry; stir into the boiling milk; cook a while, then add the eggs, and simmer 20 minutes. When this is partly cooled beat the yolks of 6 eggs and stir them in a little at a time; flavor with lemon, vanilla or cinnamon extract. Then whip the whites of 8 eggs quite firm and stir them in lightly. Bake either in cups or paper cases, 10 to 15 minutes, in a brisk oven. Sift on the top of each some powdered sugar flavored with vanilla powder or lemon zest. No sauce required. The chocolate pastry cream, and others to be found in "Cream Fillings" can be used in precisely the same way.
This is a hot soufflé pudding built on a thick pastry-cream base, and everything depends on getting that base right before the whites go in. The egg counts are unusually generous even by the standards of the book.
- What "frangipane" means hereIn this recipe frangipane pastry cream is a flour-thickened custard, with no almonds in it, not the almond filling the word now suggests. Period usage was not consistent: many nineteenth-century frangipane creams did include almonds or crushed macaroons.
- Brisk ovenRead that as a hot oven, around 400 to 425F. The puddings need to catch and rise quickly, and 10 to 15 minutes at that heat suits individual cups.
- The 20-minute simmerCook the milk, flour and sugar base until it thickens and loses its raw-flour taste, three to five minutes of real bubbling. Once the first five whole eggs are in, do not simmer it for 20 minutes as written; hold it below a boil and stir constantly for a minute or two or the eggs will curdle into strands.
- Tempering the yolksThe six extra yolks go into a base that is only partly cooled, so add them a spoonful at a time exactly as directed and keep the whisk moving. If the base is still hot enough to steam, warm the yolks with a ladleful of it first.
- Folding the whites"Quite firm" here means soft-to-medium peaks by modern standards; whites beaten stiff and dry will not fold into a base this heavy without breaking. Loosen the cream with a quarter of the whites, then fold in the rest.
- Cups and paper casesRamekins or straight-sided soufflé cups, buttered and dusted with sugar so the mixture can climb. Paper cases were the period equivalent of a stiff paper soufflé collar or a baking cup; parchment muffin liners in a tin work, though they give a shorter rise.
- YieldA quart of milk and nineteen eggs' worth of enrichment makes a large batch, roughly 16 to 18 half-cup puddings. Halve it comfortably.
- ServingThese fall within a few minutes of leaving the oven. Sift the flavored sugar over them at the table and send them out at once; the note that no sauce is required assumes they arrive still puffed.
- Vanilla powderGround vanilla bean, or vanilla sugar. Do not substitute vanilla extract in the topping, which needs to stay dry.
The base is crème pâtissière lightened with beaten whites. The closing line invites the cook to swap in chocolate or any other cream from the "Cream Fillings" chapter, to be used in the same way. The use of "frangipane" for a flour-bound custard is found in nineteenth-century pastry manuals alongside the almond cream that carried the name in the same period.