No. 44

Frangipane Cream with Vanilla or Almonds

Creme Frangipane a la Vanille ou aux Amandes

Place in a vessel six ounces of flour, six egg-yolks, two whole eggs, three ounces of sugar and a little salt; dilute with six gills of milk. Whip well the preparation, pass it through a fine strainer into a saucepan and add to it three ounces of butter and half a vanilla bean; stir, placing the saucepan on the fire until the cream becomes consistent, then remove and beat it firmly off the range; put it back on the fire to cook for a few moments, suppress the vanilla if for almond frangipane, and mix in four ounces of pounded almonds and four ounces of nut butter.

← No. 43 Frangipane Cream with Chocolate, or with Mar Elementary Methods No. 45 Mocha Cream →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a pastry-cream base stiffened with enough flour to be piped, baked in tarts, or used as a filling for pithiviers and fritters. It is thicker than a modern crème pâtissière, and it is meant to be.

The measurements in cupsSix gills is three cups (about 700 ml) of milk. Six ounces of flour is roughly 1 1/3 cups if you must use volume, but weigh it — the ratio of flour to liquid is what makes this frangipane rather than custard.
Cook the flour outThe hinge of the recipe is the second turn on the fire. Ranhofer has you thicken it, beat it hard off the heat to smooth the lumps, then return it to cook "a few moments" more. That last stint is what removes the raw-flour taste; a thickened cream that still tastes pasty has not had it.
Whisk, don't stirWith this much flour the cream will seize at the bottom and corners well before the surface moves. Use a whisk over medium heat and keep it moving into the angle of the pan; a wooden spoon will give you scorched flecks.
"Nut butter"The term may mean beurre noisette — butter cooked until the milk solids brown and it smells of hazelnut — or a hazelnut paste; the original is genuinely ambiguous and this entry alone does not settle it.
Pounded almondsBlanched almonds ground to a paste in a mortar, not modern almond flour, which is drier and coarser. A food processor with a spoonful of the sugar to keep it from oiling gets close. Four ounces is about 3/4 cup of whole nuts before grinding.
The vanilla beanHalf a split bean infused in the hot cream and then fished out; "suppress the vanilla" means simply to leave it out when you are making the almond version.
Consistency and storageIt sets very firm as it cools. Press plastic film directly onto the surface, chill, and beat it smooth again before using. It keeps two days refrigerated and does not freeze well — the flour weeps on thawing.
YieldComfortably more than a quart of finished cream, enough to fill two 9-inch tarts or a large galette.

A Little History

Frangipane's origin is traditional rather than documented: it is generally traced to a Marquis Frangipani of sixteenth-century Rome, whose almond-scented glove perfume is said to have lent its name to the almond cream. What Charles Ranhofer sets down here in 1894, in the "Elementary Methods" chapter of The Epicurean, is the French professional understanding of the word — not the ground-almond-and-butter filling most home bakers now call frangipane, but a flour-thickened cooked cream to which almonds are added. Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, wrote the book as a working manual for a brigade, which is why the entry is numbered, sitting between its chocolate and mocha neighbours, and gives no yield, no temperature and no use: the cook consulting it already knew what he wanted it for.