No. 3137

Cream Biscuit-Small

Petits Biscuits a la Creme

Take some oval-shaped lady fingers and as many more shaped round like a bouchee; cover the edges with a thin layer of apricot marmalade (No. 3675); soak the oval ones lightly with maraschino and dress them in a circle on the outer edge of a deep dish; in the center of this place the round biscuits in intermingled layers after they have also been soaked in maraschino, and cover each one of these with a rather consistent English cream (No. 42) prepared with lemon peel and beaten for seven or eight minutes on ice, then mixed with a few spoonfuls of whipped cream.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A composed cold dessert from Ranhofer's cross-referenced system: three of its components live at other numbers in the book. Once you have soft ladyfingers, strained apricot jam and a custard, it is pure assembly.

The cross-referencesNo. 3675 is apricot marmalade, meaning apricot jam pressed through a sieve and reduced slightly so it holds a line; ordinary apricot preserves warmed and strained work. No. 42 is English cream, that is, crème anglaise.
Maraschino means the liqueurNot the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Maraschino is a clear, dry-ish cherry distillate (Luxardo is the common brand); it is strong, so brush or sprinkle rather than dunk, or the biscuits collapse.
Two shapes of biscuitOval lady fingers are standard savoiardi. "Shaped round like a bouchee" means small rounds rather than fingers — pipe the same batter in coils, or cut rounds from a sheet of sponge.
Custard consistency"Rather consistent" means a crème anglaise taken thick, cooked to about 180°F/82°C so it coats a spoon heavily. Strain it the moment it thickens; the lemon peel should be infused in the hot milk and removed before the eggs go in.
Beating on iceSeven or eight minutes over an ice bath is what gives the cream body and cools it before the whipped cream is folded in. Fold, do not stir, and use no more than a few spoonfuls or the custard turns loose and weeps into the sponge.
Assembly orderJam the cut edges first, then soak, then stand the ovals around the rim, then layer the rounds in the well with custard between each layer.
Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no yield or chilling time; it is a cold entremets, served cold from the dish with a spoon.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer printed The Epicurean in 1894 after some three decades associated with the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and its numbered, cross-linked structure shapes the whole book: a dish like this is less a recipe than an instruction for combining components made elsewhere in the volume. The dessert itself belongs to the wide family of moulded biscuit-and-cream entremets related to the charlotte russe, in which ladyfingers are stood around a mould and filled with bavarian cream — here loosened into a spooned dish rather than a turned-out one. Maraschino, distilled from marasca cherries around Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, was a fashionable flavouring in nineteenth-century restaurant pastry, and it appears in Ranhofer's cold entremets where a modern kitchen would probably reach for kirsch or rum.