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Vanilla Cream Sauce
This is to be served with hot cakes, such as baba. Boil one pint of cold milk in a saucepan. Put three yolks of eggs in a small basin with two ounces of powdered sugar, one ounce of flour and a piece of vanilla stick one inch long. Beat these well together with a wire whip for two minutes, pour the mixture into the boiling milk, stir it again briskly with the whisk until it boils, remove from the fire and add one-half gill of maraschino. Beat again for one minute and pour the cream nicely over the cake before sending to the table.
A flour-stabilised pouring custard — closer to a thin pastry cream than to a crème anglaise, which is why the recipe can tell you to let it boil without fear of curdling.
- The vanilla goes in the milkBeating a one-inch length of vanilla pod into egg yolks with a whisk extracts almost nothing. Split the piece of pod, drop it into the milk as it heats, let it steep off the heat for ten minutes, then bring back to a boil and fish it out before serving.
- Weights, convertedTwo ounces powdered sugar is 57 g, about 4 to 5 tablespoons of finely ground granulated (modern confectioners' sugar is lighter and would measure noticeably more by volume for the same weight); one ounce flour is 28 g, about 3½ tablespoons. A pint of milk is 2 cups. "Powdered sugar" here means finely ground granulated, not the modern cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar, though either works if weighed.
- A gillA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so half a gill of maraschino is ¼ cup, 4 tablespoons — a real presence in a sauce of about 2½ cups, and enough that it should be added off the heat as directed so the alcohol is not driven off.
- Maraschino means the liqueurA clear, dry cherry-kernel liqueur from the Dalmatian coast, not the sugary red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Luxardo and Maraska are still made; kirsch or a good rum are reasonable substitutes.
- Boiling is deliberateThe flour needs a full boil to lose its raw taste and to set the starch, and it also protects the yolks from scrambling. Whisk constantly from the moment the egg mixture hits the milk, and keep the whisk moving in the corners of the pan.
- Consistency and strainExpect a sauce that coats a spoon and thickens further as it cools. If it stiffens too much, loosen with a little hot milk; pass it through a sieve if any lumps of flour have set.
- YieldAbout 2½ cups, enough to sauce eight to ten individual babas or one large ring.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria, compiled his 1896 Cook Book as a working record of a large hotel kitchen, which is why the sauce arrives attached to a specific cake rather than standing alone. Baba — a yeast-raised cake soaked in syrup, often said to have originated in Polish court baking and naturalised in France at some point before the nineteenth century, where the rum-soaked baba au rhum became a Paris pâtisserie staple — was standard hotel-dining-room fare in New York by the 1890s, and a spirit-scented pouring custard seems to have been a common accompaniment. The maraschino is a period marker: Prohibition is generally credited with turning the word into a description of dyed cherries, but American hotel bars and pastry kitchens both stocked the Dalmatian liqueur, and it flavoured everything from punches to ices.