No. 3154

Cream with Cherries

Creme aux Cerises

Drain on a sieve a quart of very firm whipped cream sweetened and flavored with lemon. Remove the stones from some large, black, sweet and sound cherries; stew them with powdered sugar, then leave till cold; drain their syrup into a pan and let reduce until it becomes thick. Cover the bottom of a china dish with a layer of soft macaroons broken in pieces, spread the cherries over, and mask these with another ounce of macaroons; on this dress the cream in a dome; smooth and decorate through with the cornet, and serve the syrup separately.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A layered cherry-and-cream dish from Ranhofer's cold entremets, assembled rather than cooked. The one thing that decides whether it works is the draining: whipped cream left to shed its liquid in a sieve holds a dome for an hour on the table, and cream that has not been drained will slump into the macaroons.

Drain the cream, and mean itWhip a quart of heavy cream to firm peaks, then set it in a fine sieve or muslin-lined colander over a bowl for 30 to 60 minutes in the refrigerator. The weeping liquid is what turns the macaroon layer to paste.
"Powdered sugar"In nineteenth-century American cookery powdered sugar generally meant finely ground granulated sugar, closer to caster sugar, rather than the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold under that name today. Caster or ordinary granulated will serve.
Flavored with lemonThe recipe does not say how. Zest or a lemon essence is the likeliest reading; grate the zest into the sugar first so the oils disperse.
Stewing the cherriesPitted sweet black cherries tossed with sugar and warmed gently need only 3 to 5 minutes over low heat — long enough to release juice and stay whole. Boiling them collapses the fruit and you lose the layer's texture.
Reducing the syrupDrain the released juice and reduce it to a light coating syrup, roughly the thickness of maple syrup. It will thicken further as it cools, so stop early rather than late.
The macaroonsThese are soft almond macaroons of the amaretti-morbidi type, not coconut macaroons and not French macaron shells. The "another ounce" for the top layer suggests the bottom layer is of similar order — an ounce or two of broken biscuit each, enough to line the dish rather than build a cake.
The cornetA cornet is a rolled paper cone used as a piping bag, generally with a small plain or fine-cut opening for lines and lettering. A small piping bag does the same work: smooth the dome with a palette knife, then pipe over it.
Assembly and servingBuild it in a shallow glass or china bowl and chill 1 to 2 hours; the syrup goes to table in a separate sauceboat. A quart of cream plus fruit serves 8 to 10 as a dessert course.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the restaurant's working repertory set down in order — which is why this dish arrives numbered, sandwiched between a tutti-frutti cream and a lemon-peel cream, one of dozens of variations on the same cold-cream idea. Creams of this kind were the backbone of the nineteenth-century entremets course: no gelatin, no baking, just whipped cream dressed in a dome over a fruit and biscuit base, which a large kitchen could turn out in quantity and hold on ice until the order came. The soft almond macaroon serving as a bottom layer may well be an old economy of the pastry section, where day-old biscuits could be broken up under fruit rather than thrown out; something like the same trick is often said to underlie charlottes and trifles. Black sweet cherries in this period meant a short summer window, and the separate boat of reduced syrup is plausibly explained as a matter of service — the sauce stays bright and the dome stays dry until the moment it is spooned over.