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Darioles, Vanilla
Roll out on lightly floured table a quarter pound paste exceedingly thin, then line the inside of six individual pudding moulds. Place a little bit of butter at bottom of each mould. Crack two fresh eggs in a bowl, add one and a half ounces sugar, one and a half ounces flour, half teaspoon vanilla essence and three gills milk, and sharply mix with whisk two minutes. Strain the preparation through a cheese-cloth into the moulds, evenly divided, place on a pastry tin, set in oven thirty minutes. Remove, unmould on a dish with a folded napkin, sprinkle a little fine sugar over and serve.
A small baked custard in a pastry shell, six to a batch. The original assumes you already have pastry on hand and an oven you judge by feel; both need pinning down.
- Three gills of milkA gill is half a cup, so three gills is 1 1/2 cups (355 ml). With two eggs that is a loose, pourable custard, which is why the flour is there to hold it.
- A quarter pound of pasteFour ounces (115 g) of pastry, rolled very thin, is just enough to line six small moulds. Filippini's "paste" here is his short or fine paste; puff pastry works but will lift away from the mould walls as the custard sets.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F (175C); the thirty minutes is about right at that heat for moulds of roughly 4 oz capacity. The custard is done when the centre is just set and barely trembles.
- Individual pudding mouldsDariole moulds are small tinned cups, roughly 2 inches across and 2 inches deep, usually slightly tapered rather than perfectly straight-sided. Deep muffin tins, popover cups or metal dariole moulds all serve; metal will crisp the pastry base better than ceramic.
- Weights of sugar and flourAn ounce and a half of sugar is about 3 tablespoons; an ounce and a half of flour is roughly 1/3 cup, if anything a touch over. Both are light by modern dessert standards, so the result tastes of egg and milk rather than sweetness.
- Straining is not optionalWhisking sharply for two minutes will give you lumps of flour and threads of egg white. Pushing the mixture through cheesecloth or a fine sieve is what makes the difference between a custard and a scramble.
- Vanilla essenceHalf a teaspoon of extract is the modern equivalent. If you use vanilla bean instead, warm it in the milk and let it cool before mixing, or the hot milk will begin to cook the eggs.
- UnmouldingLet them stand a few minutes off the heat, then turn out. Straight from the oven the custard is still slack and will slump. The folded napkin on the serving dish was standard presentation for moulded items of this kind.
Dariole is an old word in the pastry vocabulary: small filled pastry cases under that name appear in French and English cookery from the late medieval period, and by the nineteenth century the word had attached itself firmly to the little mould rather than to any one filling. The derivation is usually given as Old French and is not settled. By the time Alexander Filippini compiled The International Cook Book in 1906, drawing on his years at Delmonico's in New York, darioles were standard restaurant work. The recipe's brevity is a mark of that professional context, assuming a kitchen where paste was already made each morning and oven heat was a matter of judgment rather than a dial.