No. 43

Frangipane Cream with Chocolate, or with Marrow

Creme Frangipane au Chocolat ou a la Moelle

Chocolate.—Add to some vanilla frangipane cream as described below, four ounces of chocolate melted in a slack oven and diluted a little at the time with cream.

Marrow.—Soak in fresh water four ounces of marrow cut in quarter inch pieces, then melt in a bain-marie. Into a saucepan put three ounces of sugar, six ounces of flour, four whole eggs and six yolks; stir well with a spoon and dilute with a quart of boiling milk. Pass this through a sieve into another saucepan, add an ounce of butter and cook, being careful that the cream contains no lumps; when well thickened remove from the fire; mix in a few spoonfuls of chopped almonds and the melted marrow.

← No. 42 English Cream with Vanilla, Lemon or Orange Elementary Methods No. 44 Frangipane Cream with Vanilla or Almonds →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer gives two variations on a single base: a very stiff flour-and-egg pastry cream, enriched either with melted chocolate or with beef marrow. The base itself is the part that needs attention.

The hinge: no lumps means no shortcutsStir the sugar, flour, eggs and yolks to a smooth paste first, then add the boiling milk in a thin stream while whisking. The sieving step is not optional insurance; pass it through, as Ranhofer directs, before the mixture goes on the fire, then cook it while whisking constantly until it thickens, which is what cooks out the raw flour and sets the starch.
A slack ovenFor melting the chocolate this means a very low oven, reckoned loosely at somewhere around 250-300F, low enough that the chocolate softens without scorching. A bain-marie or a very low burner does the same job with less risk.
Weights, in cupsThree ounces sugar is a scant half cup; six ounces flour is about 1 1/3 cups; one ounce butter is 2 tablespoons; a quart of milk is 4 cups. The flour quantity is high by modern standards and gives a paste stiff enough to pipe or spread, not a pourable custard.
The chocolateChocolate sold for cooking in this period was often unsweetened and coarser than a modern bar, though sweetened varieties were also on the market. Use 4 oz unsweetened or 70% bittersweet and taste before adding more sugar; if you use a sweeter bar the cream will be cloying against the almonds.
Marrow, and where to get itAsk a butcher for canoe-cut marrow bones and push the marrow out in one piece. Soak the cut pieces in several changes of cold water in the refrigerator, not at room temperature, to draw out blood, then melt gently over hot water and strain. Fold it in while the cream is still hot so it stays emulsified rather than setting into flecks of fat.
Chopped almondsBlanched, peeled and finely chopped, added at the end. If you want the almond flavour more pronounced, ground almonds worked into the hot cream do more than chopped ones, which read mainly as texture.
Yield and useRoughly five to six cups. This is a filling, not a dessert on its own: it goes into tart shells, cream puffs, pithiviers-style puff pastry cakes, or between layers of gateau. Refrigerate covered and use within two days.

A Little History

Frangipane is traditionally traced to an Italian named Frangipani, a perfumer at the sixteenth-century French court whose almond scent is said to have lent its name to the almond filling; the connection is repeated in most pastry literature but is not firmly documented. What is documented is the shape of the recipe here: in Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) frangipane is a flour-thickened pastry cream rather than the almond-and-butter paste most bakers mean by the word now, and it appears in the "Elementary Methods" chapter as a building block to be flavoured a dozen ways. The marrow variation is the older-feeling of the two. Beef marrow was a standard sweet enrichment in medieval and early modern European cookery, surviving into the nineteenth century in marrow puddings and mincemeat, and Delmonico's kitchen still treated it as an ordinary pantry fat where a later cook would simply add more butter.