Home › The World's Kitchen › Gateau, Carmelite
Gateau, Carmelite
Prepare a pate-a-choux. Slide a quarter-inch tube to the bottom of a pastry bag, drop the paste into the bag, then have a clean baking tin; press down the paste into large olive shape in the tin and set them to bake in a slack oven for twelve minutes. Remove, let cool off.
Place half a pint of sweet cream in a copper basin, set on the ice and whisk up to a thick frost, then add two ounces fine sugar and one teaspoon vanilla essence; whisk again for a minute. Thoroughly wash and dry the bag used before, then drop the whipped cream into the bag, with the tube at the bottom as before. With a small stick the size of a pencil make a small, round opening in the centre and bottom of the cakes and insert cream in the opening of each cake. Have a clean melonshaped, quart pudding mould. Then carefully line the bottom and sides of the mould with the cakes and fill the interior of the mould with the rest of the cream. Carefully turn the cake into a cold dish, dredge a little fine sugar over and serve.
A moulded dome of cream-filled choux puffs, assembled and turned out at the last minute. The written method leaves two things unsaid — the oven is too cool for choux as described, and there is nowhere near enough cream for a quart mould.
- The oven is the problemA slack oven is about 275-300F, and choux will not rise in it; the paste needs a hot start of 400-425F to turn its water to steam and inflate. Bake small puffs hot until well risen and dry to the touch, then drop the heat to finish. Twelve minutes total will only work for very small pieces at high heat.
- Dry them outThe hinge of the whole dish is that the puffs come out hollow and crisp. If they are pulled while still damp inside they collapse, and there is no cavity for the stick to open or the cream to fill. Split one open to check before taking the tray out.
- QuantitiesHalf a pint of cream is one US cup, whipping up to roughly two cups. That fills the puffs and little else. A quart mould lined with puffs and filled to the centre wants noticeably more cream than the recipe states; scale the sugar and vanilla with it.
- Two ounces fine sugarFine sugar here is most likely a fine granulated (caster) sugar rather than confectioners'. Two ounces is a scant third of a cup by volume — sweet, in proportion to a single cup of cream, and worth reducing if you scale up.
- The copper basin on iceThe basin is set on ice because the cream must be kept cold, and copper chills quickly. Any metal bowl chilled in the freezer does the same job. Whip to soft-firm peaks; overwhipped cream will not pipe cleanly through a quarter-inch tube.
- It will not hold its shape for longThere is no gelatin, egg or chocolate in the filling, so the turned-out dome is held up only by cold and by the puffs themselves. Line and fill the mould, chill it hard for at least an hour, and unmould directly onto the serving dish immediately before it goes to the table.
- Filling the puffsThe pencil-sized hole in the base is the traditional method, but a plain quarter-inch tube pushed into the underside does the same work faster. Fill each puff until it feels heavy and the cream just resists.
- YieldA quart mould, properly filled, serves six to eight. Bake a dozen spare puffs — some always crack or refuse to hollow.
The International Cook Book came out of the Delmonico's tradition, and this is a restaurant pastry chef's dish rather than a household one: it assumes a pastry bag, a copper basin, ice on hand and a melon-shaped mould in the cupboard. Structurally it is a cousin of the croquembouche and the various moulded charlottes of nineteenth-century French pastry, where small baked or bought components are packed into a lined mould, chilled, and turned out as a single showpiece. The name is generally traced to the Carmelite order, whose habit lent its brown-and-white colouring to a number of French sweets and drinks; the association is traditional rather than documented. What the recipe records is pate a choux used as a building block — the same paste, piped small and filled with sweetened cream, that is otherwise known as profiteroles.