No. 3011

Cream of Biscuit with Kirsch

Creme de Biscuits au Kirsch

Put six whole eggs and four yolks into a vessel with a grain of salt and six ounces of sugar, a part of which is to be flavored with orange. (This flavored sugar is obtained by rubbing the entire surface of the fruit on a sugar loaf, and then grating the flavored part off, either with a knife or spoon.) Beat the preparation with a whip, and dilute it slowly with a quart of raw milk and four gills of raw cream. Soak four ounces of lady fingers in milk, then drain on a sieve, and put them in a bowl; dilute with the above preparation, and pass the whole through a sieve, then stir in one gill of kirsch. Butter a charlotte mold, and fill it with the preparation; set it in a saucepan containing hot water, and place it on the fire; let the water come to a boil, and keep it in this state for thirty minutes, either on the side of a slow fire or else in a slack oven. When the cream is firm to the touch in the center, take it off and and leave it for half an hour longer in the water so that it hardens, then unmold on a dish and pour over a kirsch syrup.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A large baked custard set with soaked ladyfingers, in the manner of a French crème renversée. The measurements are generous even by Delmonico's standards, and the water-bath instruction is the part most worth ignoring as written.

The measuresA gill is half a cup, so four gills of cream is two cups and the gill of kirsch is half a cup. The full batch is a quart of milk, a pint of cream, six whole eggs plus four extra yolks, and six ounces (a scant cup) of sugar.
Mold sizeWith the soaked ladyfingers the mixture runs to roughly two and a half quarts. A classic charlotte mold of that capacity is uncommon now; a 3-quart souffle dish or deep round cake pan works, or split the custard between two smaller molds and shorten the baking.
Flavored sugarRubbing an orange over a sugar loaf was how a nineteenth-century kitchen extracted zest oil without a zester. Grate the zest of one orange and rub it into part of the sugar with your fingers until damp and fragrant; the effect is identical.
"Raw" milk and creamHere raw means unscalded rather than unpasteurized — Ranhofer is telling you not to boil it first. Ordinary whole milk and heavy cream, cold from the refrigerator, are what he means.
Do not boil the water bathThe single most important departure. Water held at a rolling boil drives the custard past 180F, and it curdles, weeps and goes pitted. Keep the bath at a bare shiver, around 180F, and treat "slack oven" as 300F.
Judging donenessFirm to the touch in the center is a rough test; an instant-read thermometer in the middle should show 170-175F. The half hour resting in the hot water is real carryover cooking, not idleness, so pull it a little short of set.
Lady fingersThe biscuits of the title are ladyfingers (biscuits a la cuillere), dry and crisp, not the soft supermarket kind. Four ounces is about a dozen; soak them just until pliable or they collapse to paste in the sieve.
UnmoldingA warm custard of this size will slump. Chill it several hours, run a thin knife around the edge, and invert onto a cold platter.
Kirsch syrup and yieldNo formula is given: simmer equal parts sugar and water, cool, and stir in kirsch to taste, roughly a quarter cup to a cup of syrup. The mold serves ten to twelve.

A Little History

This is No. 3011 from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the vast compendium of the cooking he did over some three decades at Delmonico's in New York. Kirsch — kirschwasser, a clear unsweetened brandy distilled from whole cherries, stones included — came chiefly from the Black Forest and Alsace, and its faint bitter-almond edge made it the standard perfume for creams, charlottes and macerated fruit in the classic French repertoire; it appears throughout this section. The instruction to rub an orange on a sugar loaf is a reminder that refined sugar once arrived as a hard cone to be nipped and pounded at home, and that rubbing citrus against it was the ordinary way to capture the peel oil — though such loaf-sugar phrasing was a conventional carryover in French culinary texts well after granulated sugar was common, so it dates the book to nothing in particular.