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St. Honore Cream
Place in a saucepan five ounces sugar with four egg yolks, one ounce flour, the chopped rind of half a lemon and a half teaspoon vanilla essence. Mix well with wooden spoon for a minute, then pour in a gill cream and one and a half gills cold milk. Sharply mix with a whisk for two minutes, set pan on the fire, constantly stir with wooden spoon until it comes to a boil and let slowly cook for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Beat up whites of the four eggs to a stiff froth and add to the preparation, gently mix, cook for five minutes longer, continually stirring meanwhile, remove, let cool off and use as required.
This is a flour-thickened pastry cream lightened with cooked meringue — the filling generally known as crème Chiboust. The method is sound; only the units and a few habits need translating.
- The hinge: keep the whisk movingEgg yolks, flour and sugar scorch on the bottom long before the surface shows it. Stir into the corners of the pan the whole time it is on the heat, and drop the heat once it thickens so the base does not catch.
- Gills and ouncesA US gill is half a cup, so this is 1/2 cup cream and 3/4 cup cold milk. Five ounces sugar is about 2/3 cup, one ounce flour about 1/4 cup. If you read the book as British, a gill there is 5 fl oz and the cream and milk rise to 5 and 7 1/2 fl oz — the ratio holds either way.
- Ten minutes of boilingLonger than modern practice, but flour-set creams need a genuine boil of at least two minutes to cook out the raw starch taste and to destroy the yolk enzyme that would otherwise thin the cream as it cools. Judge by texture: thick, glossy, no floury flavour. Reduce the heat once it bubbles so it does not catch.
- Chopped lemon rindGrate the zest finely instead, taking no white pith, or steep strips of peel in the warm milk and strain them out. Chopped rind as written leaves chewy flecks through a cream meant to be smooth.
- Vanilla essenceRead as vanilla extract. Because it goes in at the start and is boiled for a quarter hour, much of the aroma will drive off; a second half-teaspoon stirred in at the end restores it.
- Cooking the whitesFold the stiff whites in off the heat first, then return the pan and cook gently for the five minutes, stirring — hard heat will scramble them into threads. The result is firmer and less airy than a modern chiboust, which folds hot Italian meringue into the cream and never returns it to the stove.
- Cooling and yieldMakes roughly 2 1/2 cups, enough to fill a Saint-Honoré or a tray of choux buns. Press plastic wrap or buttered paper directly on the surface while it cools to stop a skin forming, refrigerate, and use within two days; it does not freeze.
The name points to the Gâteau Saint-Honoré, the Parisian ring of choux buns and caramel named for the patron saint of bakers and pastrycooks, and the filling is generally traced to a nineteenth-century pâtissier named Chiboust working on the rue Saint-Honoré — a traditional attribution rather than a documented one. What distinguishes the cream from ordinary crème pâtissière is the meringue: beaten whites give it enough body to stand up in a tall gateau without gelatine. Its appearance in a general international collection of this kind reflects how thoroughly French restaurant pastry had become the reference point for ambitious cooking in English-speaking kitchens by the turn of the twentieth century, when a household book could set a classic Parisian cream beside plain puddings and expect the reader to attempt both.