No. 3354

Pistachio Nougat

Nougat de Pistaches

Roll out some sweet paste (No. 136) to three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness; cut it into small one and a half inch diameter rounds and brush them around with egg-yolks; dredge all around on the brushed part a circle of chopped burnt almonds (No. 1), then lay them on a buttered baking sheet and leave rest for one hour in the ice-box. Bake them in a slack oven and when finished mask the centers with apricot jam (No. 3675) and lay over a round piece of preserved apricot; glaze with rum and bestrew immediately with shredded pistachios.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A cross-referenced petit four from Ranhofer, assuming you have his sweet paste, burnt almonds and apricot jam already on hand. Everything here hangs on the border: the egg wash goes only on the rim, so the caramelized almonds stick in a clean ring and the center stays bare for the jam.

Sweet paste (No. 136)Sweet paste (No. 136) is Ranhofer's pâte sucrée; the formula is in his No. 136 and is not reproduced here. Any firm sweet shortcrust rolled to three-sixteenths of an inch (about 5 mm) will do.
Burnt almonds (No. 1)Not scorched nuts. Ranhofer's first recipe in the book is almonds cooked in boiling sugar until the syrup caramelizes and coats them — praline. Chop them small enough to sit in a neat ring, roughly the size of coarse sand.
A slack ovenA slack oven is a cool one — in modern terms somewhere around 300°F. These are pale biscuits with a caramel border; anything hotter risks darkening the praline before the paste has set. Ranhofer gives no baking time.
The hour in the ice-boxChilling relaxes the rolled paste so the rounds hold their shape, and firms the egg wash so the almond border does not slide. Ranhofer specifies a full hour in the ice-box.
Apricot jam (No. 3675)Ranhofer's apricot jam (No. 3675) is closer to what a modern pastry kitchen calls apricot glaze than to breakfast preserve; warm, strain and reduce ordinary jam a little before masking the centers.
Preserved apricotApricot preserved in syrup, cut into a disc. Good-quality apricots in heavy syrup, drained and blotted, are the nearest thing on a supermarket shelf; dried apricots plumped in syrup also work but read drier.
Glaze with rumIn period usage this most likely means a thin icing — sifted confectioners' sugar slackened with rum to a barely pourable consistency — brushed over the fruit rather than a splash of spirit. Best applied while the cakes are still slightly warm so it sets clear rather than chalky.
Pistachios last, immediatelyThe shredded pistachios are strewn while the glaze is wet; a minute late and they will not adhere. Blanch and peel them if you want the bright green Ranhofer expected rather than the dull olive of skin-on nuts.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working manual, which is why so many of its entries are little more than a line of instruction plus a string of cross-references to preparations kept ready in the pastry department. Nougat here does not mean the aerated confection of egg white and honey; in nineteenth-century French pastry the word covered preparations of nuts bound with cooked sugar, from the hard caramel-almond sheets used to build presentation pieces down to the chopped praline that borders these rounds. The finished cake is a compact demonstration of what a large pastry brigade could do with its standing stock — paste, praline, apricot glaze, candied fruit, rum icing — assembled quickly because every component was already made. Pistachios were still an expensive import in the period and were valued for color as much as for flavor.