No. 3657

Trocaderos with Raspberry

Trocaderos a la Framboise

Proceed the same as for Trocaderos with rum (No. 3658), using a pound and a half of sugar and a gill and a half of raspberry pulp strained through a very fine sieve and two and a half gills of rich cream. After removing from the starch and well brushed, dip in a thin royal icing (No. 101) slightly tinted with carmine and flavored with a little raspberry juice.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A starch-mogul cream candy: a boiled sugar-and-cream fondant flavoured with raspberry, cast in impressions made in dried cornstarch, then dipped in tinted royal icing. The instructions are deliberately partial — Ranhofer expects you to work from the rum version alongside it.

Read the companion recipe firstThis entry only substitutes quantities and flavouring; the method, the boiling of the sugar and the casting in starch all come from No. 3658, and the icing from No. 101. Without those two the page cannot be followed.
The measuresA gill is half a cup, so a gill and a half of strained raspberry pulp is about 3/4 cup and two and a half gills of cream is about 1 1/4 cups. "Rich cream" in a kitchen of this period would have meant a high-fat cream, broadly comparable to modern heavy cream.
Strain in earnestRaspberry seeds will ruin the texture and clog the fine nozzle or funnel used to fill the starch impressions. Press the pulp through a fine sieve, then again through a finer one.
Acid and creamFruit acid can curdle cream at boiling heat. One way round it is to cook the sugar and cream together and stir the strained fruit pulp in off the fire, once the batch has dropped below the boil, which also spares the flavour; Ranhofer does not specify the order here.
Starch traysThe cornstarch must be bone dry: spread it in shallow pans and dry it in a low oven before stamping the impressions, or the centres will absorb moisture and never set. Ranhofer gives no temperature. The starch is sieved and reused.
Setting timeCream centres generally need several hours to overnight in the starch at cool room temperature before they can be lifted whole; the recipe gives no time. Brush each one clean with a soft brush -- Ranhofer says 'well brushed' -- as any clinging starch shows through the icing.
CarmineCarmine is cochineal lake, still sold as a food colour (E120), though many kitchens now reach for a beet-based or synthetic red. "Slightly tinted" is the point — these should look like pale raspberry, not lipstick.
Dipping and dryingThin the royal icing to the consistency of pouring cream, dip on a two-tined fork, draw across the rim of the bowl and set on a rack or waxed paper. It dries firm in a few hours; refrigeration will make it weep.
YieldThe recipe gives no yield. After the syrup is boiled the batch will weigh appreciably less than the combined weight of the ingredients, and the number of bonbons depends entirely on the size of the impressions.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summary of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its confectionery chapters read like a working manual for a professional candy room rather than a home kitchen — the terse cross-references and the assumption that trays of dried starch are simply on hand. The starch-mogul method it relies on, in which sugar syrups are deposited into impressions stamped in a bed of cornstarch and left to crystallise, remains the basis of how jelly beans and cream-centred chocolates are made today. The name may point to Paris: the Palais du Trocadéro, put up for the Exposition Universelle of 1878, is often said to have lent its name to fashionable dishes and sweets in the decades after, though Ranhofer himself says nothing of the derivation; French-trained and relentlessly attentive to Parisian fashion, he offers his trocaderos in rum and raspberry versions side by side.