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Creme Frangipani Vanille
Place in a small saucepan four egg yolks and the white of one; add one and a half ounces flour, one and a half ounces fine sugar; briskly stir with a whisk for five minutes, then dilute with three-quarters of a pint good fresh milk, adding one ounce butter, half stick vanilla and half saltspoon salt. Set the pan on the corner of the range and continually stir for ten minutes; remove the vanilla bean. Brown to a nice golden colour an ounce butter and add it to the preparation; mix well for one minute. Transfer to a bowl and use when cold.
This is a pastry cream in the older French manner — thickened with flour rather than cornstarch, and finished with browned butter, which is what separates a frangipane cream from a plain crème pâtissière. The browned butter is the point of the recipe; do not substitute plain melted butter.
- Weights and volumes1½ oz flour is about ⅓ cup; 1½ oz sugar is a scant ¼ cup (about 3½ tablespoons). Three-quarters of a US pint of milk is 1½ cups. A saltspoon is roughly ¼ teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is a generous pinch.
- "The corner of the range"On a coal range the corner was the cooler zone. On a modern burner this means medium-low: the cream should come to a bare simmer and thicken without scorching on the bottom.
- The first five minutesWhisking eggs, flour and sugar together for five minutes before any liquid goes in is what keeps the flour from lumping. Work it to a smooth, pale paste, then add the milk gradually rather than all at once.
- Cooking the flour outTen minutes of constant stirring is not padding. Flour-thickened creams taste raw and pasty unless they actually boil for a minute or two; keep stirring into the corners of the pan with a whisk or flat spatula.
- Browned butterMelt the second ounce of butter in a small pan and take it to a nutty golden brown, no darker — the milk solids go from tan to bitter quickly. Scrape it in, solids and all, and beat it through.
- VanillaHalf a bean, infused in the milk and lifted out as the recipe directs (splitting it is optional). If using extract instead, add about a teaspoon off the heat at the end, since alcohol-based extract loses aroma during the long cooking.
- Cooling and storagePress plastic wrap directly onto the surface to stop a skin forming, and chill. It yields roughly two cups -- enough to fill a tart shell, a dozen small choux, or a layered cake. Use within two days; it is a custard.
Frangipane is generally traced to a perfumed glove-maker's scent said to have been fashionable in sixteenth-century France, the name attached to an Italian family, with the almond cream taking its name from the perfume rather than the reverse -- this is the traditional account rather than a documented one. By the time this book was compiled, the word had loosened considerably: recipes titled crème frangipane vary widely, with almonds or crushed macaroons sometimes present and sometimes not. This version is the plainest of the family -- vanilla only, no almond at all.