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Orange Dariole Filling. Richest
Requires deep pans for baking in as it flows over ordinary rims. 1 pound of sugar. 8 ounces of butter. 4 oranges. 10 eggs. Grate and squeeze the oranges into the sugar, add the butter and eggs and cook the mixture thick over the fire with constant stirring. Let it cool and then beat it light before filing the crusts.
And yet some worthy hopefuls having seen pie edges stand two inches high in distinct flakes while weighing next to nothing, will do their brave endeavors too, and lay a double edge on theirs, making a band of paste to place on the rim of the plate first, washed with egg, and the proper pie crust laid on top. That is all wrong. We told them they could not make our hotel pies. For if the airiest crust that can be laid on a pie edge will hardly be eaten is it not folly to double the weight and substance? Puff-paste perfectly made will rise high enough from one layer only from an eighth to a quarter inch thick. If it will not then it will not when doubled in thickness. And, besides, how much valuable time is wasted from better work, putting a useless double edge on the pies.
This is an orange curd, richer than most, meant to be cooked down on the stove and then piped or spooned into baked pastry shells. Half the entry is the author venting about double pie edges; the working recipe is the first four sentences.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerTen whole eggs with sugar, butter and citrus juice will curdle if the pan gets much past 175F. Cook over low heat or a bain-marie, stirring constantly, and pull it when it coats the spoon heavily; strain it if any threads of set egg appear.
- A dariole is the vessel, not the dishA dariole is a small deep mould -- though the name originally belonged to the pastry itself, and the mould took its name from it. The recipe assumes you are lining the moulds with pastry and filling them. The warning about deep pans is literal: this filling flows over ordinary rims, so use moulds or a muffin tin with real depth rather than shallow tartlet tins.
- Scale and yieldA pound of sugar, half a pound of butter and ten eggs is hotel quantity, roughly 3 lb of finished filling, enough for two or three dozen small darioles. Quartering it gives about 4 oz sugar, 2 oz butter, 1 orange and 2-3 eggs for home baking.
- Whole eggs, not yolksTen whole eggs makes a firmer, paler, more custard-like curd than the yolk-only versions common now, so do not substitute yolks and expect the same texture.
- The orangesGrate the zest into the sugar first and rub it in with your fingers; the sugar draws out the oils and much of the flavour comes from there. If the mixture tastes flat, add a squeeze of lemon.
- Beating it lightCool the curd completely before beating, ideally over ice or in the refrigerator. Beating it warm just loosens the butter and you get a greasy, slack filling instead of an aerated one.
- The double edge argumentWhitehead is right that a second band of pastry laid on the rim does not double the rise. Puff paste lifts by steam between its own layers, and a strip laid on top of another simply bakes into a thick, heavy border. One layer an eighth to a quarter inch thick is still the correct instruction.
- StorageCurd this rich keeps about a week refrigerated and freezes well, but the baked pastry does not; fill the shells the day they are served.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to Jessup Whitehead, a Chicago hotel cook and trade journalist whose books were written for men working commercial ranges rather than for housewives, which is why the quantities run to pounds of sugar and dozens of eggs and why the prose keeps sliding into argument with other cooks. The dariole itself is much older than the book: the name is generally traced to medieval French cookery, where a dariole was a small filled pastry case, and by the nineteenth century the word had attached itself to the tall, slightly tapered mould that shape required. The filling here is a curd, a technique that came into English kitchens with cheap sugar and imported citrus and was standard in fruit tarts and small pastries by the time Whitehead was writing. His insistence that a hotel pie edge cannot be improved by doubling it is a period argument worth noticing: labour, not ingredients, was the scarce thing in a hotel pastry room, and a great deal of his advice is finally about not wasting a cook's hours.