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Confectioners' Cream
Into a saucepan pour one pint of cold milk and set it on the stove. In another vessel mix two ounces of powdered sugar with one ounce of wheat flour and one-half ounce of corn flour; break in two whole eggs and whisk well for two minutes. When the milk is boiling add it to the preparation, and after stirring it for one minute longer put it into a saucepan and set it on the stove. Beat thoroughly until it comes to a boil, then remove from the fire and add immediately one teaspoonful of essence of vanilla. Stir well again for another minute, then pour it into a bowl and let it get cold. This mixture is used for many confectioners' purposes.
This is pastry cream — crème pâtissière — thickened with a mix of flour and cornstarch rather than yolks alone. It is straightforward, but a few of the measures and one point of technique need translating.
- The measures in cupsTwo ounces of powdered sugar is about ½ cup, one ounce of wheat flour a scant ¼ cup, and half an ounce of corn flour about 2 tablespoons. Weighing is more reliable here, since flour packs unevenly and the starch ratio governs the set.
- "Corn flour" means cornstarchHere corn flour is the fine white starch, not ground maize meal; a starch is what thickens a cream of this kind. Cornmeal will give you gritty, broken cream.
- The hinge: bring it fully to a boilBoth the flour and the starch need to reach a rolling boil for the cream to thicken properly and lose its raw-flour taste, and the boil also deactivates the enzyme in the egg yolk that would otherwise thin the cream as it sits. Beat hard and constantly at that stage, as the recipe directs.
- TemperingThe recipe adds the boiling milk to the egg-and-flour mixture rather than the reverse, which helps keep the eggs from scrambling; the flour and starch also protect them. Pour it in a thin stream while whisking, then return everything to the pan.
- Vanilla off the heatThe essence goes in after the pan leaves the stove because the alcohol carrying the flavour boils off. If you infuse a split vanilla bean in the milk instead, you can add it at the start and strain it out.
- Strain and coverPass the finished cream through a fine sieve to catch any egg thread, then press plastic film directly onto the surface as it cools so no skin forms. Neither step is stated in this recipe.
- Cooling and keepingChill it quickly in a shallow dish rather than leaving a deep bowl on the counter; it is a milk-and-egg custard and belongs in the refrigerator once cool. Use within two or three days, and whisk it smooth before piping or spreading.
- YieldA generous two cups, closer to two and a half -- enough to fill a large tart shell, a dozen éclairs, or a layer cake.
Pastry cream is the workhorse filling of the French professional kitchen, and Oscar Tschirky's treating it as a base preparation rather than a finished dish is consistent with how a hotel pâtisserie of 1896 might plausibly have been organised: a few mother preparations made in quantity, then turned into éclairs, napoleons, fruit tarts and cake fillings as the day's orders came in. The version here, stiffened with wheat flour and cornstarch and using whole eggs rather than yolks alone, is the economical hotel formula — it holds its shape under a slice of cake and survives a few hours in a warm dining room better than an all-yolk custard. Oscar himself was not a cook but the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and the book gathers the house's working repertoire; entries like this one, ending flatly with "used for many confectioners' purposes," read as notes from a professional kitchen rather than instructions written for a home baker.