No. 3323

Rouen Mirlitons

Mirlitons de Rouen

Beat well together three eggs, two ounces of sugar, a gill of orange flower water and three gills of cream; strain the whole through a colander. Pour it into tartlet molds lined with puff paste parings (No. 146), dredge with sugar and push carefully into a hot oven to bake.

← No. 3322 Rice Cakes Small Cakes for Entremets No. 3324 Small Savarins →

For the Modern Kitchen

A baked custard in puff pastry shells, written in the shorthand Ranhofer used for cooks who already knew the drill. Two things need attention: the volume of orange flower water and the oven.

The measuresA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). So this is 3 eggs, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/2 cup orange flower water and 1 1/2 cups cream — a fairly thin custard by design, since it has to set in a shallow tartlet.
Orange flower waterHalf a cup of it in this quantity of custard will taste soapy with any modern bottle. Nineteenth-century distilled flower waters were variable in strength and probably weaker than today's concentrated commercial product, though no reliable comparison can be made. Start with a teaspoon or two, make up the lost liquid with cream or milk, and taste before filling.
The oven is the hinge"A hot oven" is conventionally read today as something like 425-450F, though Ranhofer gives no figures. That is right for puff paste and wrong for egg custard — held there, the filling will bubble, curdle and weep. Give the tartlets 8-10 minutes hot to set and lift the pastry, then drop to 325F until the custard is just barely trembling at the centre.
Puff paste paringsNo. 146 is his puff paste; parings are the offcuts from trimming other work. Scraps re-rolled once give a shorter, less soaring pastry, which is what you want under a wet filling. Bought all-butter puff, rolled thin, does the same job.
Strain properlyA colander here means any straining vessel; use a fine sieve to catch the chalazae and any set egg, or the surface will be lumpy.
Dredge with sugarThe sugar dusted on before baking is meant to catch and glaze in the initial heat. Granulated works; confectioners' sugar dissolves and disappears.
Yield and servingAbout twelve 2 1/2-inch tartlets. Serve barely warm or at room temperature the day they are made — the pastry softens overnight.

A Little History

Mirlitons de Rouen are a Norman speciality, and the name is borrowed from the mirliton, a little reed pipe or kazoo, generally explained as a reference to the tart's shape once the pastry rises around the filling. The classic Rouen version is finished with whole or sliced almonds pressed into the top and a heavy dusting of sugar; Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, gives the plainest possible form here, relying on cream and orange flower water alone. That is characteristic of The Epicurean (1894), which was written as a working reference for a professional brigade rather than a book to cook from at leisure "small cakes for entremets" a large kitchen might be asked to produce. The heavy hand with orange flower water is also of its period: distilled flower waters were a standard flavouring in nineteenth-century pastry work, used where a modern kitchen would reach for vanilla or citrus zest.