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Chateaubriand Cream
Place a jelly-mould on the ice, and pour some liquid jelly around it, turning it about sideways in order to allow it to set; stick some shredded almonds round the sides and top until the mould is covered, then put a little more of the jelly around, and, when set, give it another coating. When this has been done, fill in the cavity with noyau cream.
This is a lining technique more than a recipe: a gelatin-jacketed mould studded with almonds, filled with a liqueur-flavored cream. Oscar assumes you already have both the liquid jelly and the noyau cream from elsewhere in the book.
- The hinge: work cold and thin"Place a jelly-mould on the ice" means set the mould in a bowl of ice and water, or nest it in crushed ice, so each coat of jelly sets on contact. Pour only a few tablespoons at a time and rotate the mould constantly; a thick pour will pool at the bottom and slide off the sides.
- Liquid jellyA clear wine or fruit gelatin, melted and cooled to just above setting point — barely warm to the finger. If it is hot it will melt the coat beneath it; if it is cool it will set in ropes. The original gives no quantity or mould size; something on the order of 1 1/2 to 2 cups would be enough to jacket a 1-quart mould over the successive coats described.
- Noyau creamA cream flavored with noyau, the kernel liqueur; most likely a Bavarian-style custard cream set with gelatin rather than whipped cream alone, though the recipe here does not say and the book's own base recipe should govern. Crème de noyaux is still sold, and amaretto is sometimes suggested as a substitute. Do not attempt to infuse your own from apricot or peach kernels — they are cyanogenic and unsafe in quantity.
- Shredded almondsBlanched almonds cut lengthwise into fine strips, not the commercial slivered kind, which are short and will not lie in a pattern. Toasting them is a modern instinct but wrong here: colored almonds look muddy through clear jelly.
- Filling and settingLet the almond shell chill firm — 30 minutes in the refrigerator is safer than Oscar's ice — before filling. The cream should be at the point of setting when it goes in, or its weight will bruise the jelly wall. Then a minimum of four hours, and overnight is better.
- UnmouldingDip the mould in warm (not hot) water for five to eight seconds, wipe it, and invert onto a chilled plate. Any longer and the almond pattern slumps.
- YieldThe original gives none, and names no mould size; a 1-quart mould would serve roughly six to eight.
The Chateaubriand name attached itself to a good deal of nineteenth-century restaurant cooking, most famously the thick center-cut steak, and is generally traced to François-René de Chateaubriand, the writer and diplomat whose household cook is traditionally credited with the beef preparation; by the time this dessert appeared the name had become a general marker of grand-service elegance rather than any specific link to the man. What the entry really documents is the pastry cook's art of chemiser — jacketing a mould with a thin shell of jelly, then decorating it from the inside so the pattern appears in reverse when turned out. Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) is full of such entries: terse notes for professionals who already knew the base creams and jellies by heart, and needed only the assembly. Noyau, the almond-scented liqueur made from stone-fruit kernels, was a standard flavoring of the period, valued for a bitter-almond note that reads as sophisticated rather than sweet.