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Petites Fauchonnettes
Place in a bowl two egg yolks, one and a half ounces sugar, with half teaspoon vanilla essence; stir well for two minutes, add one and a half ounces sifted flour, thoroughly mix, gradually add one and a half gills milk, continually mixing while adding it. Strain into a small saucepan, heat on the range for eight minutes, continually mixing without boiling. Remove and let cool off. Evenly divide the preparation into six individual pudding moulds. Set them in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove, unmould and serve.
A stiff, flour-bound pastry cream cooked twice: once on the stove, then again in small moulds until it sets firmly enough to turn out. The proportions are tiny by modern standards, so weigh rather than guess.
- The measurementsOne and a half gills is three-quarters of a cup (about 175 ml), a gill being half a cup. One and a half ounces of sugar is roughly 3 tablespoons; one and a half ounces of flour is a scant third of a cup, or about 42 g.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal in 1906. The recipe says only 'set them in the oven', so any figure is a modern inference: a moderate oven, around 350F/175C, would set small moulds in twenty minutes without colouring them much.
- The hinge: do not boil the creamEight minutes of constant stirring below a boil is what cooks out the raw flour taste and thickens the starch without curdling the yolks. If it catches or breaks into lumps at this stage, nothing later will fix it.
- How thick it should beThree-quarters of a cup of milk against 42 g of flour gives a very stiff paste, far thicker than a pouring custard though not as stiff as choux dough. That stiffness looks deliberate; it is what would allow the little puddings to be unmoulded whole.
- Preparing the mouldsThe recipe says nothing about it, but butter the moulds well and dust them with sugar or flour. Cold, stiff pastry cream will not release from bare metal or ceramic.
- No water bathThe recipe calls for none. With this much flour the set depends largely on starch rather than egg, which may be why no bain-marie is specified.
- UnmouldingLet the moulds stand two or three minutes out of the oven, run a thin knife around the edge, then invert onto the plate. Straight from the oven they are fragile; fully cold they stick.
- Yield and servingSix small moulds, so six portions of a few mouthfuls each. The recipe specifies no accompaniment; something of this size would suit a light sweet at the end of a long menu, with a dusting of sugar, a spoonful of fruit puree or a little apricot glaze.
Filippini's International Cook Book gathers small French entremets of this kind, and the name here is a diminutive built on a proper noun: petites fauchonnettes, little Fauchon-things. Fauchon is an ordinary French surname, and it is sometimes suggested that the name nods to Fauchon, the Paris épicerie on the Place de la Madeleine that had become a fashionable name in luxury food by the turn of the century, though nothing supports the connection. Whether the dish came from that house or was simply flattered by a chef is not documented. What the recipe does show plainly is the professional French kitchen's habit of making one preparation serve many purposes: this is ordinary crème pâtissière, the flour-thickened pastry cream that fills éclairs and tarts, stiffened with extra flour and baked in moulds so it can be turned out and named as a dessert in its own right. Alexander Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the book reads throughout like a chef's notebook — quantities in ounces and gills, no oven temperatures, and an assumption that whoever reads it already knows what a properly cooked cream looks like on the spoon.