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Wine Custard
Put one quart of rich milk in a saucepan with six ounces of sugar and boil it. Beat the yolks of twelve eggs with six more ounces of sugar till light and thick, then pour in gradually the boiling milk. Return the custard to the saucepan, and stir it over the fire till thick and on the point of boiling; then remove it at once, for if it boils the eggs will curdle, and stir into it two wineglassfuls of white wine. Strain the custard into a basin and set it on the ice till cold. Put some slices of jelly-cake into a large bowl, pour in the custard, pile some whipped cream on the top, and serve; or, if preferred, the custard may be turned into saucers, with small round Italian cakes floating in them.
Flawn of Fruits, Viennese Style Line a scalloped flawn-circle with a tartlet paste; decorate the edge of the border with leaves of paste and brush them over with egg. Cover the bottom and sides of the mould with paper, fill up the center with flour, put it in a moderate oven and bake for forty minutes. This is what is called cooking it "a blanc." Take it out, empty out the flour, remove the paper, let it cool, turn it out and mask inwardly with a layer of apricot marmalade. Place the crust on a dish, and fifteen minutes before using fill the center with a bavarois mixture of rice and almond-milk thickened on the ice, putting it in the flawn in layers alternately with apricot marmalade and raising it up in the center to the shape of a dome. Place it on the ice for a few minutes to get firm, then put a circle of green gages at the base of the bavarois dome, then a circle of halves of glazed peaches below. Put a pile of cooked cherries on the bavarois in the center of the circle of peaches. Cover all of the fruits over with some of their own syrup when quite cold, by means of a paste-brush, and serve.
Two recipes have run together on this page: a stirred wine custard, and a Viennese fruit flawn that uses the custard family's chilled cousin, a bavarois. Both are pastry-kitchen work of the 1890s scaled for a hotel dining room.
- The hingeThe custard must be pulled off the heat before it boils, exactly as written. Cook it to 175-180F on an instant-read thermometer and it will thicken and hold; past about 185F the yolk proteins tighten and the custard breaks into curds and whey, which no amount of straining fixes.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, so two wineglassfuls is roughly half a cup. Add it off the heat, as directed, since the acid in wine will encourage curdling in a hot custard.
- WeightsSix ounces of sugar is a generous 3/4 cup granulated (about 170 g); the recipe uses twelve ounces in total, half in the milk and half beaten with the yolks. A quart of "rich milk" means whole milk, or whole milk with some cream added.
- Twelve yolks to a quartThis is a very rich ratio, closer to a modern creme anglaise base for ice cream than to a pourable dessert sauce. Expect roughly six cups of custard, serving eight to ten in the trifle form.
- Jelly-cake and Italian cakesJelly-cake is thin sponge layered with jam, sold by the round; sliced sponge cake or jam-filled Swiss roll stands in. "Small round Italian cakes" are probably little dry almond macaroons of the amaretti type, which float and soften in the custard.
- Flawn-circle, and cooking à blancA flawn (flan) circle is a bottomless tart ring set on a baking sheet. Filling it with flour over paper is period blind baking; dried beans or ceramic weights over parchment do the same job, and the flour can be sieved and used later for pastry.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F by the usual modern equivalence. Forty minutes is right for a fully blind-baked shell that will hold a cold filling without softening.
- Bavarois and green gagesA bavarois is a custard set with gelatine and lightened with whipped cream; here it is flavoured with rice and almond milk. Green gages are greengage plums, in season briefly in late summer — preserved or tinned ones, drained, are the practical option, as the recipe assumes bottled fruit in syrup throughout.
- Assembly timingFill the shell fifteen minutes before serving, as instructed. The apricot marmalade masking the inside of the crust is not decoration; it seals the pastry against the moisture of the bavarois.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a nine-hundred-page compilation aimed as much at the housekeeper as at the professional. Wine custard belongs to the long line of English boiled custards flavoured with sack, sherry or Madeira; poured over jam-filled sponge and topped with whipped cream, it is essentially a trifle. The flawn that follows it shows the other half of the Waldorf kitchen: French pastry vocabulary — à blanc, bavarois, masquer — applied to a display piece built from bottled fruit, the sort of thing arranged on a sideboard where guests could see it. That a single page moves from a homely trifle to a domed almond bavarois ringed with greengages and glazed peaches is a fair picture of what a large American hotel was cooking in the 1890s.