No. 3035

Flawn au Lion d'Or

Flan au Lion d'or

Divide some apples in eight pieces each; peel, core and cook them in butter, and when half done mingle in some apricot marmalade (No. 3675) and finish cooking. Line a flawn ring (No. 3170) with fine short paste (No. 135), raise the edges, pinch them and let the flawn stand for twenty-five minutes in the ice-box or any other cool place. Then cover the bottom and sides of the paste with buttered paper, fill up with dry rice, and cook in the oven. As soon as the crust is done, empty it out and remove the plate, then brush the surface with egg-yolks and return the crust to the oven to color. When cold mask the inside with apricot marmalade, fill in alternate layers of white and well-reduced apple marmalade, flavored with vanilla and apples cooked in butter, finishing with a layer of the apples; dredge powdered macaroons over the top and then cover with apricot marmalade and on this pour a Conde preparation (No. 2); bestrew with sugar, and glaze under a salamander (Fig. 123), then serve. Have a separate vanilla syrup mingled with apricot marmalade.

← No. 3034 Flawn a la Manhattan Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3036 Alliance Fritters →

For the Modern Kitchen

A blind-baked short-paste tart layered with two kinds of apple and finished under the broiler with an almond icing. Ranhofer writes in cross-references, so almost every component points elsewhere in the book; here is what those numbers stand for.

The hinge: bake the shell fully before it is filledEverything that goes into this tart is already cooked, so the pastry gets no further baking to set it. Line it with paper and dry rice, bake in a hot oven until the edges are dry and pale gold, lift out the rice and paper, brush with yolk and return it briefly to colour and seal the base. Ranhofer specifies neither temperature nor time.
Flawn, flan and the flawn ring"Flawn" is simply the older English spelling of flan, meaning an open tart. The flawn ring is a bottomless metal tart ring set on a baking sheet; a fluted tart tin with a removable base does the same job. "Remove the plate" is obscure; it most probably means lifting away the lining and ring rather than any serving plate.
Apricot marmaladeNot marmalade in the citrus sense — Ranhofer means apricot jam cooked down and sieved smooth, the standard pastry glaze. Warm good apricot jam, push it through a sieve, and reduce it slightly if it is loose.
Apple marmaladeA thick apple purée reduced until it holds its shape on the spoon, not applesauce. "White" marmalade means cooked gently without colouring; keep it pale and drive off enough water that it will not weep into the crust.
Condé preparationRanhofer's Condé is an icing of egg whites beaten with powdered sugar and ground almonds, spread thin. It is what gives the glazed almond crust on top; a plain royal icing with almonds folded in behaves the same way.
SalamanderThe period salamander was an iron plate heated red and held above the surface. A broiler at its highest setting, with the tart on a low shelf and watched constantly, does the work in a minute or two — the sugar catches very fast.
Powdered macaroonsCrisp almond macaroons, dried out and crushed to crumbs, dredged between the fruit and the apricot glaze, where they would also take up any juice. Amaretti crushed fine are the closest current equivalent.
Yield and serviceRanhofer gives no size or number of portions; a tart of about 9 inches would serve eight. The accompanying vanilla syrup mingled with apricot marmalade is poured around or passed separately; make it thin enough to run.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the repertoire he cooked at Delmonico's in New York, and the naming of this tart follows the fashion of the grand restaurant kitchen for attaching a proper name to an otherwise standard construction — a blind-baked short-paste shell, apple two ways, apricot glaze, almond icing browned at the last moment. The Lion d'Or was a common French hotel and inn sign, and dishes so labelled in nineteenth-century menus are often said to borrow the name rather than descend from any one house. What the recipe really shows is how such a kitchen cross-referenced itself: the apple marmalade, the apricot marmalade, the short paste and the Condé icing are all called for as preparations made elsewhere, so the tart was assembled from things already made rather than started from fruit and flour. The archaic spelling "flawn" survived in English cookery writing well into the nineteenth century, from the Old French flaon, itself from a Frankish word for a flat cake.