No. 3628

Baskets Filled with Candied Fruits, or Ice Cream Fruits

Corbeilles Garnies de Fruits, ou de Fruits en Glace

Take some ordinary nougat (No. 3621) and roll it out to a quarter of an inch in thickness: from it cut a round ten inches in diameter. Prepare twenty-one wires, each five inches long, coat them with a layer of colored pulled sugar (No. 3618) three-sixteenths of an inch thick and fasten them to the round of nougat at half an inch from the edge, leaving an inch space between each one. Have some pulled sugar, either white or colored; imitate a rope and arrange it around the base of the basket; pull some more and sugar and roll it into strings a quarter of an inch thick and three feet long; make a braid of this sugar the same as a wicker basket going in and out of the wires, continuing as far as the top, finishing the whole with another rope the same as the bottom. Make the handles two and a half inches in diameter with the same sugar and pass them through rings fastened with sugar cooked to "crack (No. 171). Inside the upper part of the basket arrange a nougat foundation and cover it either with candied fruits, fresh fruits or else those made of ice cream or water ice.

← No. 3627 Sugar for Casting in Molds Large Show Pieces No. 3629 Perrette's Basket →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is confectioner's architecture rather than cooking: a woven basket of pulled sugar built on a nougatine base, filled at the last moment. Almost everything depends on sugar temperature and on the humidity of the room you work in.

What the numbered references meanNo. 3621 nougat is nougatine: caramelized sugar worked with almonds, rolled out hot and cut while still pliable. No. 3618 pulled sugar is boiled sugar poured out, cooled to a workable slab and pulled until it turns satiny and opaque. No. 171 "crack" is the crack stage, in the region of 290-310F (145-155C), used here as glue.
Work the nougatine hotThe ten-inch round must be cut while the nougatine is still warm and leathery; once it cools it shatters rather than cuts. Keep the mass on a lightly oiled marble slab under a heat lamp or in a low oven around 200F and cut with an oiled knife or a warmed cutter.
Pulled sugar wants dry airSugar work fails in a humid kitchen. Sugar pulled on a damp day turns sticky and dull within minutes and the braid will sag off the wires. Work in the driest room available, keep a warming lamp over your working sugar, and store finished pieces in a sealed box with a food-safe desiccant such as silica gel packets kept separate from the sugar.
The wires are not edibleThe twenty-one uprights are structural armature. Use stainless steel florist or piano wire, never galvanized or coated craft wire, and treat the basket as a display piece whose frame must be removed before anything is eaten. Anchor them by dipping the ends in hard-crack sugar and setting them into the still-soft nougatine base.
Braiding rhythmThree-foot strings of quarter-inch sugar cool faster than you can weave them. Pull and roll one at a time, keep the reserve under a lamp, and rewarm the working end briefly if it stiffens. Splices are hidden behind an upright with a touch of hard-crack sugar.
HandlesTwo and a half inches in diameter means the loop's diameter, not the thickness of the sugar rope. Form them over an oiled cylinder or a curved template, let them set completely, then attach through the sugar rings — attempting to bend and fix in one operation almost always snaps them.
Filling and timingCandied fruit can sit in the basket for a long while; fresh fruit will weep and soften the sugar it touches; ice cream or water ice moulded as fruits must go in at the last possible moment and the whole piece served immediately. Condensation from frozen fillings is a chief danger to these baskets.
Scale and purposeA ten-inch base gives a substantial table centerpiece. It is not a dessert portion in itself — the fruit inside is the food, the basket is the ornament.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, served in two spells rather than one continuous stretch, and its final sections on grosses piÎs montées belong to a tradition of architectural sugar work generally traced to Antonin Carême in early nineteenth-century France, who famously drew on architectural pattern books for his confectionery. Ranhofer's numbered cross-references — to nougat, to pulled sugar, to the crack stage — assume a working confiseur in a brigade kitchen with a marble slab and a sugar boiler, which is why the instructions read as a specification rather than a recipe. The genre faded with the service style that supported it; what survives of it today is largely in competition pastry, where pulled-sugar showpieces are still judged on much the same terms.