No. 120

Panada Cream Frangipane

Panade Creme Frangipane

Boil four gills of cream; put into another saucepan, four eggs, an ounce and a half of flour and some salt; mix and dilute with the cream, set it on the fire, and stir it with a spoon, bearing on the bottom of the saucepan, and when thickened and well worked remove it from the fire at the first boil and then set it away to cool with a buttered paper over it.

← No. 119 To Stone Olives Elementary Methods No. 121 Panada of Flour and Milk, Bread-Crumbs, and →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a working component rather than a finished dish: a stiff, savory pastry cream used to bind quenelles and forcemeats. It behaves exactly like a crème pâtissière without sugar.

Four gills of creamA gill is half a cup, so this is 2 cups (about 475 ml) of cream. Heavy or whipping cream is the intended article; whole milk gives a looser panada.
An ounce and a half of flourThat is a weight, roughly 42 g, or about 1/3 cup of all-purpose flour measured lightly. Weighing matters here because the whole point of the mixture is a predictable stiffness.
Mix the flour with the eggs firstThe order in the original is deliberate: eggs, flour and salt are combined into a smooth paste, then thinned with the hot cream. Reversing it, or adding cream to dry flour, gives lumps that no amount of stirring will fix.
Temper as you diluteAdd the boiled cream to the egg-and-flour mixture in a thin stream while whisking. Dumping it in at once will set the eggs before the flour has a chance to disperse.
"Bearing on the bottom of the saucepan"Ranhofer means constant pressure with a wooden spoon or flat whisk against the pan floor, corners included. This is the hinge of the recipe: the flour-egg mixture scorches there long before the surface shows any sign of it.
Remove at the first boilThe flour needs to reach a boil to lose its raw taste and to neutralize the enzyme in egg yolk that would otherwise thin the mixture. Hold it there for only a few seconds; prolonged boiling drives out water and turns the panada pasty.
The buttered paperLaid directly on the surface, it prevents a skin from forming as the cream cools. Buttered parchment or plastic wrap pressed onto the surface does the same job.
Yield and useExpect roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups of very thick cream. It is not eaten on its own; chilled, it is beaten into pounded fish, poultry or game to make quenelle and forcemeat mixtures, and it should be cold before it goes near them.
KeepingAn unsweetened egg-and-dairy cream is highly perishable. Cool it quickly, refrigerate, and use within a day or two.

A Little History

Panada comes through Italian and French from the Latin panis, bread, and originally meant just that: bread soaked in liquid, used to stretch and soften a forcemeat. Ranhofer gives several panadas in a row in his Elementary Methods section, and this one substitutes flour and eggs for the bread, producing a smoother and more elastic binder for delicate quenelles. The name frangipane is confusing to modern readers, who associate it with sweet almond filling; in nineteenth-century professional French cookery it also denoted this savory cooked cream, and the two are generally traced to the same source, an almond-scented preparation named after an Italian family of the Frangipani. The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its opening sections read like a factory manual: the small, unglamorous preparations that a brigade made in quantity so that the showpiece dishes later in the book could be assembled at speed.