No. 3148

Cornets of Orange Cream

Cornets, Oublies, Plaisirs de Creme a l'Orange

Pound eight ounces of shelled and peeled almonds with eight ounces of sugar and four egg-whites to obtain a fine paste; add to it two ounces of vanilla sugar (No. 3165), two ounces of flour and eight lightly beaten egg-whites. Dress this paste on a waxed baking sheet, laying it with a table-spoonful into thin round wafers four inches in diameter, and bake them in a hot oven. When of a fine golden color remove them from the oven and roll them around some tin cornet forms and leave till cold. Dress in a pyramid on a dish covered with a napkin and fill each one with whipped cream flavored with orange.

← No. 3147 Chestnuts with Cream Cold Entremets — Creams, Jellies & Charlottes No. 3149 Cream Bain-Marie-Molded →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's wafer is a French oublie: a thin almond batter baked flat, then rolled hot around a cone. The batter is easy; the window for shaping is not.

Roll them hotThe wafers must be lifted from the sheet and wrapped around the forms within a few seconds of leaving the oven, while still pliable. Once cool they shatter. Bake two or three at a time until you have the rhythm, and return any that have stiffened to the oven for a few seconds to soften again.
"A hot oven"Ranhofer gives no temperature; a hot oven of the period is usually read as somewhere around 400F. The wafers are thin and take colour fast at the edges, so watch them closely and pull them when the rims are golden and the centre still blond.
Pounding the almondsEight ounces of blanched almonds with the sugar and four whites, worked to a smooth paste, is the mortar-and-pestle method. A food processor does it in a minute: grind almonds and sugar first, then add the whites and run until no grit remains, or the wafers will be rough and hard to roll.
The egg whitesTwelve whites in all, four worked into the paste and eight lightly beaten and folded in at the end. That is roughly 1 1/2 cups of white; the finished batter should be thin enough to spread with the back of a spoon, not a stiff meringue.
Vanilla sugarRanhofer's No. 3165 is his vanilla sugar. Two ounces of caster sugar rubbed with the scrapings of a bean, or standard vanilla sugar, substitutes directly.
Waxed baking sheetMost likely a sheet rubbed with wax to stop the thin batter sticking. Use parchment or a silicone mat, and spread the batter with the back of the spoon into even four-inch rounds; thick spots will not crisp.
Cornet formsMetal cream-horn or krumkake cones. Buttered foil wrapped around a cone of card works if you keep the seam tight.
Fill at the last momentWhipped cream flavoured with orange zest and a little Curaçao or orange-flower water. The wafers soften soon after filling, so pipe them as they go to the table.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894, a compendium of the French haute cuisine he had spent some three decades serving to American diners. The three names in the heading all attach to the same wafer: the oublie was a thin rolled wafer sold in the streets of medieval and early modern Paris by a chartered guild of oublieurs, and the name plaisir is traditionally traced to the cry used to hawk them. By Ranhofer's day the wafer had moved from the street to the dessert service, where it became a vehicle for cream, and the pyramid on a folded napkin is a common nineteenth-century presentation.