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Cream Flawn
Put four eggs into a basin with four tablespoonfuls of flour and the same quantity of sugar, mix well and stir in one pint of milk. Strain this through a sieve into a saucepan, adding a lump of butter, a pinch of salt and two tablespoonfuls of finely-chopped almonds. Place it over the fire and stir until it becomes thick. Let it boil for a few minutes, then remove from the fire and add one tablespoonful of lemon sugar and three ounces of butter. Butter well a flawn-mould, line it with a little short paste and pour in the cream mixture, which must be cool; mask it first with orange marmalade and then with some sugar icing; or it may be masked with a meringue, when the surface should be decorated and the meringue dusted over with powdered caster-sugar; put in the oven to color slightly.
This is a flour-thickened pastry cream baked in a lined mould and finished with marmalade and icing or meringue. The instructions assume a pastry cook's habits, and two of them need spelling out.
- The crust is not blind-baked hereOscar tells you to line the mould with short paste and pour in cooled cream, then only "put in the oven to color slightly" at the end. That short colouring will not cook raw pastry. Bake the lined shell blind first at 375F until dry and pale gold, then fill it.
- "Lemon sugar"Sugar rubbed hard against a lemon until it takes up the zest oil, then dried and crumbled — a standard pastry-kitchen preparation of the period. The nearest modern substitute is a tablespoon of sugar rubbed with the grated zest of one lemon.
- Flawn-mouldA shallow round mould with sloping or fluted sides, the ancestor of the modern flan ring. A 9-inch fluted tart tin with a removable base does the same job.
- The butter is given twiceA "lump" goes into the pan at the start and three ounces more goes in off the heat. The second addition is the one that matters — beaten into the hot cream after it leaves the fire, it gives the gloss and the richness. The first lump is cook's discretion, call it a tablespoon.
- Cooking the creamFour tablespoons of flour makes this a pastry cream, not a delicate custard, so the instruction to let it boil is correct and necessary: the flour needs to boil for two or three minutes to lose its raw taste and to thicken fully. Stir constantly and use a heavy pan; it catches easily.
- Cool it properly"Which must be cool" is not a throwaway. Warm cream will soften and soak the pastry. Press cling film directly onto the surface to stop a skin forming and chill it before filling.
- "Mask"Nineteenth-century kitchen usage for coating a surface completely. Here it means a thin even layer of warmed, sieved marmalade over the set cream, then icing or meringue over that.
- The final ovenOnly to colour. For a meringue finish, 400F for five to eight minutes, watching it; for the plain icing finish, a few minutes at 350F is enough to set the surface.
- YieldA pint of milk and four eggs will roughly fill a 9-inch shell and should serve six to eight; the recipe itself gives no mould size or yield.
"Flawn" is the old English form of the word that became flan, from the Old French flaon, and in medieval and early modern English cookery it generally meant a custard or cheese mixture baked in a pastry case — the same word that runs through French, Spanish and Latin American cooking today, though the dishes it now names differ (the Spanish flan is a caramel custard with no pastry at all). By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the dining rooms of the Waldorf in the 1890s the spelling was archaic in American use, and its appearance in his book may reflect the English and French professional manuals that American hotel kitchens of the period drew on. The finish is characteristic late-Victorian pastry work — a fruit glaze, then icing or meringue, then a dusting of caster sugar and a brief turn in the oven for colour, so that the dish reaches the table looking finished rather than merely baked.