No. 3025

Crusts with Fruits a la Mirabeau

Croutes aux Fruits a la Mirabeau

This entremets, though simple, can be served at the most sumptuous dinners. Cut a well-pared fresh pineapple across in two; divide the largest end into two parts, and these into medium-sized slices; pare again to have them all of the same size and shape, put them into a vessel and moisten to their height with a cold syrup of twenty-eight degrees; cover with a round piece of paper, and keep them in a cool place. After six hours drain off the syrup, and adding to it a handful of powdered sugar pour it back on the fruit and operate thus twice, but should preserved pineapple be used it will require to be done four times. Bake some savarin paste (No. 148) in a large buttered savarin mold (Fig. 139), or a large cradle mold, and leave stand for twelve hours. Cut this cake straight on top, then into transversal slices of equal thickness, and cover one side of them first with a thin layer of apricot marmalade (No. 3675), then with a layer of Conde preparation (No. 2), range them at once on a baking sheet, bestrew with fine sugar, glaze in a slack oven, and detach from the baking sheet as soon as glazed. Fasten a round flat of Genoese cake on a dish and on it place a ring of the same or of meringue, having it much higher than the flat itself, but not too wide (this ring is intended to uphold the slices of pineapple); brush it over with apricot marmalade, also the lower Genoese flat, and let dry in the air. Select some good, large, preserved cherries (demi-sucre), wash them in warm water, and place them in a copper vessel with some cold syrup of twenty-eight degrees. Now drain the slices of pineapple, and dress them upright in the center of the ring, one overlapping the other, and bent out slightly so they form the shape of a basket. Then fill the hollow in the inside with the well-drained cherries, dressing them in a pyramid; brush the pineapple over with some fine apricot marmalade, diluted with Madeira wine; surround the base with the slices of glazed savarin, forming them into a pretty crown, and mask the whole lightly with the marmalade. Serve with this entremets a sauce-boatful of the same marmalade diluted with syrup and Madeira wine mixed with a Julienne of candied fruits cut from orange or mandarin peel, pears and apricots, adding a spoonful of pistachios. To make this entremets more plentiful the crusts can be surrounded at their base with a row of candied green-gages, cut in two, and the stones replaced by almond paste (No. 125) flavored with vanilla.

← No. 3024 Crusts with Cherries or Strawberries a la Mi Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3026 Crusts with Madeira →

For the Modern Kitchen

An architectural dessert from Delmonico's kitchen: a glazed savarin cut into slices, arranged as a crown around a basket of syruped pineapple filled with cherries. Nearly all the work is scheduling, and the hinge is that both the pineapple and the cake need long, unhurried rests before assembly.

Read it backwards firstThe pineapple sits in syrup, which is drained, re-sugared and poured back twice, six hours at a stretch, and the savarin must stand twelve hours before it will slice cleanly. Plan on starting a full day ahead; a fresh savarin will tear rather than cut into even transversal slices.
Syrup of twenty-eight degreesDegrees Baume, read with a saccharometer, not a thermometer. Twenty-eight Baume is a heavy syrup of roughly half sugar by weight — on the order of 2 1/4 cups sugar to 2 cups water, brought to a boil and cooled completely before it goes on the fruit.
Why the syrup is drained and re-sugaredEach soaking pulls water out of the pineapple and dilutes the syrup. Adding sugar and returning it restores the strength so the fruit keeps candying rather than sitting in juice. Canned or preserved pineapple, already partly saturated, gets four rounds instead of two.
Savarin paste and Conde preparationSavarin paste (No. 148) is a rich yeast-risen batter, close to a baba, baked in a ring mold. The "Conde preparation" (No. 2) is a stiff mixture of egg white, powdered sugar and ground almonds spread thin over the cut face — a macaroon glaze, not a sauce.
Slack ovenAbout 275 to 300F. The glaze should dry and set to a pale crust without coloring; higher heat browns the almond-and-white mixture and it cracks off the slice.
Preserved cherries, demi-sucreHalf-candied cherries, sold packed in syrup. Modern glace cherries are considerably sweeter and firmer; the warm-water wash and the cold syrup bath in the original are there to soften them and rinse off surface sugar, and both are still worth doing.
Genoese base and the supporting ringA flat round of Genoise sponge fastened to the dish, then a tall narrow ring of sponge or baked meringue set on it. The ring does structural work — the pineapple slices lean against it — so build it upright and let the marmalade brushed over it dry properly before loading it.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer set this down in The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows exactly what a fashionable American dessert course was expected to be: not a bowl of fruit but a constructed object, assembled from four or five separate preparations cross-referenced by number to other pages of the book. The pineapple is the point of the dish. Fresh pineapple reached northern tables by fast steamer from Cuba and the Bahamas in Ranhofer's day and was still expensive enough to be worth carving into matched slices and displayed upright like the staves of a basket. Garnishes and dishes called a la Mirabeau are generally traced to the revolutionary orator the Comte de Mirabeau, though in French kitchen usage the name attached most firmly to savory preparations with anchovy and tarragon, and its appearance on a sweet entremets here looks like a house christening rather than an inherited classical formula. The savarin itself carries a nineteenth-century name too — the ring-shaped yeast cake was named for Brillat-Savarin, the author of La Physiologie du Gout, by Parisian pastry cooks a few decades before Ranhofer began writing.