No. 52

To Prepare Hollow Crusts

Pour Preparer les Croutes Creuses

Hollowed out crusts are used for serving small garnishings composed of purees, game fillets, and also boned small birds, such as larks and reed-birds; they are also employed to serve with poached eggs, after filling the hollow space with some garnishing. Hollow crusts are made of bread crumb, timbale paste or puff paste.

Bread Crumb Crusts are cut oval and half heart shaped (Figs. 42 and 43); they are two inches long and three quarters of an inch thick; make incisions on one side near the edge, using for this a small knife; brown both sides in a sautoir with clarified butter, then drain them to open and scoop out the crumb.

Crusts made of Timbale Paste are formed from an oval layer of paste, three-sixteenths of an inch thick; they are shaped in unbuttered tin rings, half an inch high, either oval or round, plain or channelled (Figs. 44 and 44a); the paste is cut flush with the top of the ring, the ring is now removed and the outside edge of the paste is pinched prettily, the top also to form the crest; let dry for a few minutes; they are now to be placed in larger buttered rings, or surrounded with bands of buttered paper to support the paste while cooking; line the inside with buttered paper and fill with raw rice; cook in a moderate oven; when done remove from the rings, empty out the rice, brush the crusts with an egg-wash and put in the oven to color nicely.

To Make Puff Paste Crusts Plain or with Fluted Cutter.—Cut the paste round or oval shaped in any desired size, arrange them on a moist baking sheet, a short distance apart, and prick them; moisten the edges with a brush and apply around this a band of the same paste three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness by five-sixteenths of an inch in width; fasten the ends of the band together, egg the surface and bake these crusts in a moderate oven the same as small bouchees.

← No. 51 To Prepare Croutons for Soups, Roasts, Veget Elementary Methods No. 53 Egging and Moistening →

For the Modern Kitchen

Three separate methods for making small edible containers — fried bread cases, molded paste shells, and puff-pastry rings. The hinge in all three is thickness: at three-sixteenths of an inch the paste holds its shape, and much thicker it will not crisp through.

Bread crumb means the crumb"Bread crumb" here is the soft interior of a loaf, not dry crumbs. Cut two-inch ovals or half-hearts three-quarters of an inch thick from a dense, day-old white loaf; anything airy and modern-sliced will collapse when you scoop it.
Sautoir and clarified butterA sautoir is a shallow straight-sided pan. Clarified butter is called for because the milk solids in whole butter scorch before the bread browns; ghee works, or use half butter and half neutral oil.
Timbale pasteNot given here; it is a separate stiff flour paste used purely as an edible mold rather than as a tender pastry, which is why it can be pinched into a crest and hold it.
Oven temperaturesA moderate oven is roughly 325-350F in modern terms; the book gives no figure. The timbale-paste crusts blind-bake until set and dry, then get an egg wash and go back in briefly to color.
Puff paste run hotterModern practice bakes bouchees and vol-au-vent cases at 400-425F so the layers lift before the butter renders out. At 350F you will get a paler, flatter case; the rest of the method -- pricking the base, moistening the edges before applying the collar, egging the surface -- follows the text.
Rings and paperUnbuttered rings for shaping, buttered rings or buttered paper bands for baking. Plain metal tart rings or cut lengths of stainless pipe do the same job; the paper collar exists to stop the sides slumping before the paste sets.
Raw rice as blind-baking weightRice used this way can be dried, cooled and kept in a jar to be reused many times for the same purpose. It will not be fit to eat afterward.
The fillings namedLarks and reed-birds (bobolinks) are protected songbirds and no longer legal game in the United States; in Europe larks are generally protected, though limited hunting persists under national derogations. Purees, game or poultry fillets, mushroom ragouts and poached eggs all suit the same cases.
Yield and timingFigure one or two crusts per person as a garnish. All three types are best made the day they are used; the fried bread cases go soft within hours and the pastry shells lose their crispness overnight.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years running the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry sits in the Elementary Methods chapter for a reason: hollow crusts were not a dish but a component, turned out by the dozen so that a purée, a salmi or a poached egg could arrive on the plate standing up rather than spreading. The vocabulary is French and unapologetic — croûtes creuses, sautoir, bouchées — because Ranhofer was writing for professional cooks trained in the same system he was. The casual reference to larks and reed-birds marks the date as clearly as anything in the book: small migratory songbirds were sold in American markets by the dozen in the 1880s and 1890s, a trade that the Lacey Act of 1900 and later the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 brought to an end.