No. 3300

Darioles with Orange Flower Water

Darioles a l'eau de Fleur d'Oranger

Line twelve buttered molds (No. 1, Fig. 137) with puff paste parings (No. 146) rolled out thin. Put into a basin one gill of flour and two ounces of sugar, dilute with two whole eggs, two tablespoonfuls of orange flower water and three gills of milk; stir well and run the preparation through a fine colander; use it to fill the molds, putting a small piece of fresh butter on the top of each. Dredge over with sugar and bake in the oven, unmolding as soon as they are done.

← No. 3299 Darioles Duchess Small Cakes for Entremets No. 3301 Darioles with Vanilla →

For the Modern Kitchen

A custard baked in small puff-paste cases — essentially a French dariole, close kin to the Portuguese and English egg tarts. The whole batter is thin and pourable, and it is meant to be.

GillsA gill is half a cup. So the batter is 1/2 cup flour, 2 oz (about 1/4 cup) sugar, 2 eggs, 2 tablespoons orange flower water and 1 1/2 cups milk. That is a very loose custard, not a cake batter.
Orange flower waterTwo tablespoons may read strong to modern palates; bottled orange blossom waters vary widely in strength and some will taste soapy at that dose. Start with 2 teaspoons and taste the raw batter.
The moldsRanhofer's No. 1 mold is a dariole, a small tinned mold of a few fluid ounces. Deep muffin cups or individual popover tins stand in. Butter them well; the pastry lining is thin and wants something to cling to.
Puff paste paringsTrimmings from a previous batch of puff pastry, re-rolled. Any all-butter puff pastry rolled thin (about 1/8 inch) does the job; re-rolled puff also rises less, which suits a lining.
StrainingRunning the mixture through a fine colander (use a sieve) is the step that matters. It catches unincorporated flour and the chalazae of the eggs, and it is the difference between a smooth set custard and a lumpy one.
Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the custard is just set with a slight wobble at the center and the pastry edges are colored. Pushed further, the custard curdles and weeps.
Butter and sugar on topThe pat of butter melts into a glaze and the dredged sugar caramelizes lightly under the top heat. Add the sugar just before baking so it does not dissolve and run.
UnmoldingTurn them out while hot, as instructed.
YieldTwelve small pastries; serve warm the day they are made, as an entremets or with fruit.

A Little History

The dariole is often said to be among the oldest named pastries in the European repertoire: daryols appear in fourteenth-century English manuscript cookery, including the collection known as the Forme of Cury, as small pastry cases filled with a sweetened, spiced custard, and the French name gave itself in turn to the tapering tinned mold still sold as a dariole mold. Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's in New York, includes a run of them in The Epicurean (1894) differentiated only by flavoring — Duchess, orange flower water, vanilla — which is how a professional kitchen of the period built a repertoire: one sound base preparation and a shelf of aromatics. Orange flower water, distilled from bitter orange blossom, was the older of those aromatics by centuries and was long established in pastry work; vanilla, then expensive and increasingly fashionable, was in the process of displacing it.