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Fanchonette
(French cream tart.) Line a dish with fine puff paste, bake, then fill it with a custard made of 1/4 pound each of flour and sugar, the yolks of 6 eggs, and 1/2 cup of cream or milk, cooked carefully until it is smooth, in a double boiler. Add flavoring of wine or vanilla, pour a meringue over the top, sweetened to taste, decorated with cherries and citron.
A pastry-cream tart under meringue, written in the telegraphic style of 1900 cookbooks that assumed the reader had made custard a hundred times. The proportions as printed need thought before you begin.
- The liquid is shortA quarter pound of flour is about one cup, and a quarter pound of sugar about half a cup; half a cup of cream cannot wet them, let alone cook to a smooth custard. Either the flour is meant as a quarter of a cup, or the dairy is meant as a pint or more. Treat this as a standard pastry cream — roughly 2 cups milk or cream, 6 yolks, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 cup flour — rather than following the printed ratio literally.
- Blind bake properly"Line a dish with fine puff paste, bake" means a fully blind-baked shell: dock the base, weight it, and bake at 400F until the layers are dry and coloured through, since it will not return to the oven long enough to cook further.
- Double boiler, and whyA flour-thickened yolk custard scorches and curdles over direct heat. Over simmering water it needs steady whisking and must reach a full boil-and-thicken stage to cook the raw starch out; undercooked flour tastes pasty. Cool it with the surface covered so no skin forms.
- "Flavoring of wine"Most likely a sweet or fortified wine, such as Madeira, sherry or Marsala, though the recipe does not specify. Stir it in off the heat — a tablespoon or two — after the custard has stopped cooking so the aroma survives.
- Setting the meringueThe recipe does not say what to do with the meringue once it is poured over. Meringue-topped tarts of the period were generally returned to the oven briefly to set and colour; about 10 minutes at 350F, or a few minutes at 425F for a darker top, works. A blowtorch works but leaves the interior of the meringue raw and weeping.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced with the holiday baking supplies. Slice it thin; the cherries called for here would have been glace or brandied rather than fresh.
- YieldThe recipe gives no dish size; the rebuilt quantities above will fill roughly one 9-inch tart, serving about eight. Cut it the day it is assembled — meringue over a wet custard weeps and the pastry softens overnight.
A fanchonnette is a French pastry of cream in a baked crust finished with meringue, usually made as small individual tartlets rather than the single dish given here; the name is traditionally traced to Fanchon, the familiar diminutive of Francoise, though that derivation is folk tradition rather than documented fact. Its appearance in a book like this one is characteristic of American cookbooks around 1900, which gathered foreign dishes and offered them in a few lines, on the assumption that the cook already understood puff paste, a boiled custard and a meringue and needed only the assembly and the name. What the entry really preserves is the period's taste in decoration — wine flavouring, candied citron, cherries — which mattered as much as the eating.