No. 3299

Darioles Duchess

Darioles a la Duchesse

Have in a vessel one ounce of flour, two whole eggs, six yolks and four ounces of sugar, diluting with one pint of cream; pass the whole through a sieve and add to it six crushed macaroons. Line a dozen buttered molds (No. 1, Fig. 137) with puff paste parings (No. 146); into the bottom of each place a little finely cut-up candied fruits, fill them with the preparation and on all lay a small piece of fresh butter; sift the tops with sugar and bake in a hot oven; when the paste is well cooked, unmold on wire grates to cool.

← No. 3298 Crescents with Preserves Small Cakes for Entremets No. 3300 Darioles with Orange Flower Water →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a baked cream custard in a puff-paste shell, made in small deep dariole molds. The whole job hinges on getting the pastry cooked without letting the custard boil, so the oven and the mold size matter more than anything else.

The hinge: heat the pastry, not the custardRanhofer specifies only a "hot oven," with no temperature given, and that heat is aimed at the paste, while a custard of eight eggs to a pint of cream sets at about 175-180F and suffers above that. Starting hot to set and colour the shells, then dropping the heat for the rest of the bake and pulling them when the centres still wobble slightly, is a reasonable modern way to manage it.
Quantities in modern measureOne ounce of flour is a scant 1/4 cup; four ounces of sugar is a generous 1/2 cup; the pint is presumably the US 16 fl oz, so 2 cups. Heavy cream is probably the nearest modern stand-in for the unstandardised "cream" of the 1890s.
The moldsRanhofer's No. 1 mold (Fig. 137) is a dariole mold: a straight-sided or slightly flared metal cup, small in capacity, though the book does not state how much it holds. Deep muffin cups or small metal timbale molds work; buttering them thoroughly is what makes the unmolding possible.
Puff paste paringsThe recipe assumes you have offcuts of puff paste left from another job, which is why it calls for parings rather than fresh dough. Rolled scraps of any all-butter puff pastry, about 1/8 inch thick, line the molds fine; parings puff less evenly than virgin paste, which is actually an advantage in a lined mold.
MacaroonsThese are almond macaroons in the French sense, dry and crisp, not the coconut kind and not modern macarons. Crushed amaretti or almond biscotti give the same effect: they thicken the custard slightly and carry most of the almond flavour.
StrainingPassing the flour, eggs and cream through a sieve before the macaroons go in is not optional. It removes flour lumps and the egg chalazae, which otherwise show as white threads in a pale custard.
Sugar on topThe sifted sugar and the dab of butter together give a lightly caramelised surface. The instruction to "sift" points to a fine or powdered sugar; be aware that modern confectioners' sugar contains starch and can go chalky rather than glaze.
Yield and servingTwelve small cakes, one or two per person. They are meant as an entremets, served just warm or at room temperature the day they are baked; the pastry softens overnight.

A Little History

A dariole is one of the oldest surviving names in French pastry, appearing in cookery manuscripts well before Ranhofer's day and used loosely for a small pastry case with a rich filling of cream, almonds or cheese. By the nineteenth century the word had narrowed to mean both the filled tartlet and the deep little mold it was baked in, which is why a modern pastry cook still buys "dariole molds" without necessarily knowing what a dariole is. The suffix a la duchesse was one of the standard grand-cuisine tags of the period, attached to dozens of unrelated dishes to signal enrichment, here the almond macaroons and candied fruit rather than a plain custard. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as an encyclopaedic record of that repertoire, and this recipe sits among its entremets chapters.