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French Cream Pie
Place in a saucepan four egg yolks, two ounces sifted flour, half pint cold milk, two ounces granulated sugar and one ounce good butter. Sharply mix with a whisk for two minutes, place on the fire, and as soon as it comes to a boil place in a bowl and let cool off. Then add two ounces peeled and finely chopped almonds and a tablespoon orangeflower water. Arrange a thin layer of feuilletage so as to entirely cover a pie plate, neatly press the paste around the edges, trim off any superfluous paste adhering and lightly wet the edges. Cut out a round piece of feuilletage half inch wide and place it all around the edges of the pie plate; lightly egg the border. Pour the preparation in the centre of the plate, spreading well. Make a few light incisions around the ring, then bake in the oven for twenty-five minutes. Remove, dredge a little fine sugar over and serve.
A puff-pastry shell filled with a flour-thickened pastry cream, flavoured with almonds and orange flower water. The original assumes a professional pastry kitchen and gives neither temperature nor yield.
- The hinge: cook the cream properlyWhisk without stopping over medium heat and bring the mixture to a full boil. The original says to take it off the fire as soon as it boils; flour-thickened creams can taste raw and pasty if pulled the moment they thicken, so an extra minute at the boil, still whisking, does no harm. The yolks will scramble at the base if you stop stirring.
- FeuilletageThis is simply puff pastry. All-butter frozen puff, rolled thin, is a fair substitute; you need enough for a lined plate plus a long half-inch strip for the raised border.
- Weights and measuresTwo ounces flour is a scant half cup; two ounces sugar is a generous quarter cup; one ounce butter is two tablespoons. Half a pint of milk here is one US cup (8 fl oz). Two ounces of almonds is roughly a scant half cup, chopped fine.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, but puff pastry needs heat: 400-425F for the twenty-five minutes, until the border is well risen and browned and the filling is set. If the rim colours too fast, drop to 375F for the last stretch.
- Cool the cream before fillingPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface as it cools so no skin forms, and let it cool fully. Warm filling will soften the raw pastry and hinder the lift.
- "Egg the border" and the incisionsBrush the strip of pastry with beaten egg, keeping it off the cut edges, which glues the layers shut and blunts the rise. The light incisions are shallow nicks in the ring that encourage it to open evenly as it puffs.
- Orange flower waterStill sold, and still potent. A tablespoon in a filling built on one cup of milk is assertive by modern taste; two teaspoons may suit better.
- Yield and servingEnough for one pie plate, probably around 9 inches, cut into six to eight small wedges. Dredge with confectioners' or superfine sugar and serve barely warm or at room temperature; it does not keep well past the day it is made.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, written by a man who spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe reads exactly like a professional's shorthand: French terms left untranslated, no oven setting, no yield, on the assumption that whoever is reading already knows what feuilletage is and what a hot pastry oven feels like. The filling is essentially crème pâtissière, a custard stiffened with flour so it will hold a cut edge, and the pairing of almonds with orange flower water is at home in nineteenth-century French pâtisserie, where distilled flower waters did much of the aromatic work now done by vanilla extract.