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Pastry Cream
Put one pint of cream and one pint of milk into a stewpan, place it on the fire, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, and after it has boiled up put in two ounces of sugar, the peel of a lemon and a little salt, and let it remain until the peel is infused in the cream. Add the yolks of eight or nine eggs and beat up, keeping the pan over the fire. When the cream is of a good consistence pass it through a fine sieve, rubbing it with a wooden spoon into a basin, where it may be kept until required for use. If the cream is liked very thick, more eggs may be added.
This is a pastry cream without starch — essentially a very rich boiled custard set by egg yolk alone. That single fact governs everything about how it behaves on the stove.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerOnce the yolks go in, the mixture must not boil. Without flour or cornstarch to protect the protein, it curdles somewhere around 185F; pull it off between 175F and 180F, when it coats the spoon and holds a line drawn by a fingertip.
- Quantities in modern termsOne pint of cream and one pint of milk is 2 cups each, four cups of liquid in all. Two ounces of sugar is about 1/4 cup — restrained by current taste, and worth scaling up to 1/2 cup if the cream is going into a plain tart shell.
- Eight or nine yolksNineteenth-century eggs were more variable and, by most accounts, generally smaller than today's large eggs. Eight modern large yolks in four cups of dairy gives a pourable custard; adding several more yolks approaches the "very thick" version the recipe offers without specifying a number, and is closer to what a filling needs.
- StewpanA stewpan is a broad, straight-sided pan, usually with a lid. Use a heavy-bottomed one, or set a bowl over simmering water if you would rather have insurance than speed — a wooden spoon is specified, and it has the practical virtues of not scratching a tinned pan and of telling you when the bottom starts to catch.
- Lemon peelPare the zest in wide strips with no white pith, and give it ten to fifteen minutes off the heat in the hot dairy to infuse. Strain the peel out before the yolks go in, or it will fight you at the sieve.
- TemperingThe instruction to add the yolks straight to the hot pan works only with constant stirring and low heat. Whisking a cup of the hot liquid into the beaten yolks first, then returning everything to the pan, is the reliable route to the same result.
- Straining is not optionalPassing it through a fine sieve catches the inevitable strands of set egg and the chalazae, and is what makes the difference between a good custard and a smooth one. Press it through with a spoon or flexible spatula as directed.
- Yield and keepingA generous quart, closer to five cups — enough to fill two 9-inch tarts or to serve eight as a pouring cream. "Kept until required for use" meant a cool larder; refrigerate it with plastic pressed to the surface and use within three days.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, compiled his 1896 book from the working repertoire of a French-trained American hotel kitchen, and this entry shows that lineage plainly: creme patissiere is one of the foundation preparations of the French pastry room, the filling for eclairs, mille-feuille, tarts and choux. What is notable is what the recipe leaves out. Classic pastry cream from Careme onward is thickened with flour or cornstarch as well as yolks, which is precisely what lets it be boiled hard and piped cold; Oscar's version is bound by yolk alone, putting it nearer to a thick creme anglaise or the older English boiled custard, and requiring a far steadier hand at the range. Lemon peel infusion is a common flavoring of the period; vanilla was obtainable by the 1890s but still comparatively costly. The blunt phrase "when the cream is of a good consistence" is characteristic of the whole volume: it was written by and for cooks who had been taught by eye, not by thermometer.