No. 3015

Crescents of Noodles with Cherries

Croissants de Nouilles aux Cerises

Cut up finely about a pound of noodles (No. 142), blanch, drain and put them into a saucepan with two gills of cream, two ounces of fresh butter, a pinch of salt, two ounces of sugar and three tablespoonfuls of brandy; set the saucepan on a slack fire and let cook slowly, being careful to stir the contents at frequent intervals until all the moisture is absorbed, then pour the preparation on two baking sheets covered with buttered paper, spreading to a layer three-eighths of an inch thick. Bake in a hot oven. Unmold as soon as done and cover one of these flats with a thick layer of reduced apricot marmalade (No. 3675); on top place the other flat, then cut into crescents, using a pastry cutter two and a half inches in diameter. Dress these crescents in a circle on a dish and fill the center with compoted cherries, serving a separate cherry and kirsch sauce (No. 3003).

← No. 3014 Cream with Apples Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3016 Croquettes a la Trimalcion →

For the Modern Kitchen

A layered noodle cake cut into crescents — the kind of Delmonico's entremet that assumes a pastry section standing by. Most of the work is in cooking the noodles dry enough that the slabs hold together under the cutter.

The hinge: cook until truly dryThe noodle-and-cream mixture must be stirred over low heat until no free moisture remains and it moves as one mass. A slack fire means the lowest steady heat; hurry it and the layer will slump on the sheet and never cut cleanly.
Gills and other measuresA gill is half a cup, so two gills of cream is one cup. Two ounces of butter is half a stick; two ounces of sugar is a scant third of a cup by volume.
The noodlesNo. 142 is Ranhofer's noodle recipe. A pound of good fresh egg pasta or a dried wide egg noodle both work; "cut up finely" means chopping the blanched noodles into short lengths so the slab binds rather than shreds.
Oven temperatureRanhofer gives no temperatures; "a hot oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 425-450F. The sheets need only long enough to set and lightly colour the surface -- the mixture is already cooked -- so check early.
Buttered paperParchment, buttered, on rimmed sheet pans. Spread the layer to a consistent three-eighths of an inch; uneven thickness gives crescents that split at the thin edge.
Reduced apricot marmaladeNo. 3675 is Ranhofer's apricot marmalade; here it is cooked down until thick enough to stand up as a filling rather than run. Ordinary apricot preserve, boiled a few minutes and strained, does the same job.
CuttingA crescent is cut with two overlapping passes of a 2½-inch round cutter. Do this while the slabs are still slightly warm and press straight down; a twisting cut drags the layers apart.
Kirsch sauce and yieldNo. 3003 is a cherry sauce finished with kirsch, served separately in a boat. Two full sheet pans of noodle cake yield a large platter — figure eight to ten servings as a dessert course.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put this in the 1894 Epicurean, the vast record of what he cooked over some thirty years at Delmonico's in New York. The dish reads as Central European rather than French in origin: sweet noodle puddings baked with cream, sugar and fruit run through Austrian, Bohemian and Jewish cooking, and cherries with kirsch point the same direction. Ranhofer gives it a French name and French technique — the mixture spread to an exact thickness, sandwiched with reduced apricot, cut with a plain round cutter into croissants, dressed in a ring with the compote in the middle. The cross-references to numbered recipes for the noodle dough, the apricot marmalade and the cherry sauce show how the book was meant to be used: not as a single recipe but as one instruction in a kitchen where the components were already made.