No. 3010

Cream a la Maintenon—Fried

Creme Frite a la Maintenon

Remove the outer shells from three-quarters of a pound of chestnuts; plunge them into boiling water and let boil up once or twice; then remove the saucepan from the fire, and quickly abstract the second skin; return them to a saucepan and cover with milk, adding a quarter of a vanilla stick; cook very slowly, and then press through a sieve. Put the puree into a bowl, pour over six ounces of sugar cooked to "small crack" (No. 171) and mix it into the pulp, beating it vigorously. Spread this on a sheet of buttered paper to a quarter of an inch in thickness. Prepare a pound of white and delicate apple pulp, put it in a saucepan with a pound of sugar, and reduce; then add a tablespoonful of fecula, and a gill of water; spread this over the chestnuts and smooth it to the same thickness, then let get cold. Cut it into lozenges, and cover each one with apricot marmalade (No. 3675); roll them carefully in pulverized macaroons; then dip them in beaten eggs, and afterward in bread-crumbs; smooth with the blade of a knife, and fry to a fine color in hot white frying fat; drain, wipe, and bestrew with vanilla sugar, then dress in a pyramid on a folded napkin, and serve with a separate English cream vanilla sauce (No. 3004).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A two-layer fruit-and-chestnut paste, chilled firm, cut, breaded and deep-fried — closer to a confection than a custard, despite the name. Everything depends on getting both pastes stiff enough to slice cleanly.

The hinge: both layers must be paste-firmIf the chestnut layer or the apple layer is still soft when you cut the lozenges, they will slump in the breading and burst in the fat. The apple should reduce to the consistency of quince paste — a spoon drawn through it leaves a channel that holds — and the assembled sheet wants several hours cold, ideally overnight.
"Small crack"Ranhofer's petit cassé is a sugar stage around 275–285°F on a thermometer; a drop in cold water forms threads that are hard but bend before snapping. Cooked past this into hard crack the chestnut mixture turns brittle rather than pliable.
A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces.
FeculaPotato starch. Cornstarch behaves much the same here; it is there to bind the reduced apple, not to thicken a sauce, so a level tablespoon is enough.
ChestnutsThree-quarters of a pound in the shell yields around nine to ten ounces peeled; shell and skin are roughly a fifth of the weight. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are a fair substitute — simmer them in the milk and vanilla to soften and flavour, then sieve. The second skin must come off while the nuts are hot, or it welds on.
Pulverized macaroonsFrench macaroons of this period are almond-meringue biscuits, dry and crisp; Italian amaretti are the closest thing on a modern shelf. Crush them fine, and treat that coating as the first flour-stage of the breading — the egg and crumbs go on over it.
White frying fatRefined lard or clarified suet, chosen because it is neutral and pale. Any neutral oil at 350–360°F does the job. Fry in small batches and only until golden; the interior needs to warm, not cook.
Yield and serviceNo yield is stated; a sheet this size would give a couple of dozen small lozenges. The English cream of No. 3004 is a vanilla creme anglaise, served separately.

A Little History

The name honours Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon, the second, morganatic wife of Louis XIV, whose name was attached to a whole family of preparations — lamb cutlets in a paper case, a béchamel with onion and mushroom, and sweets like this one — with no evidence that she ate or invented any of them. By the time Charles Ranhofer compiled The Epicurean in 1894 out of three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, such Bourbon-era names were shorthand for a certain register of luxury rather than any documented dish. The recipe itself belongs to the classical repertoire of crèmes frites: a stiff sweet paste cut into shapes, breaded and deep-fried. Chestnut and apple were both cheap autumn produce turned into something expensive by labour — peeling, sieving, sugar-boiling, reducing, layering, chilling, breading and frying — which is precisely the point in a book written for kitchens with a brigade to spend the hours.