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Sweet Cannelons
(Marseilles.) These, like the above, are peddled along the streets on little trays. Roll some good puff paste very thin, cut in strips, and roll them around a stick, dust with sugar and fill the centre, where the stick held the edges overlapping, with whipped cream, after they are baked.
A street pastry reduced to two sentences: puff paste wound on a stick, baked, sugared, filled with cream. The gaps are all in the handling of the paste, which is where cream horns go wrong.
- The stickUse metal cream-horn or cannoli moulds, lightly greased. A wooden dowel will scorch and the pastry will stick to it; if you improvise with dowels, wrap them in greased foil and expect to lose a few.
- Cutting the stripsRoll the paste about 1/8 inch thick and cut strips roughly 3/4 inch wide and 12 inches long. Wind from the closed tip of the mould toward the open end, overlapping each turn by about half its width so the seam holds when the layers lift.
- Oven heatPuff paste needs a hot oven: 425F for the first 10-12 minutes to get the lift, then down to 375F for another 8-10 minutes to dry the layers through. A cool oven melts the butter out before the steam can raise the leaves.
- When to sugarThe recipe appears to place the dusting with the filling, after baking. Sugar dusted on before baking will caramelise to a thin glaze instead; either order works, but sugar put on pastry while it is still hot can go patchy.
- UnmouldingTwist the mould free while the horns are still warm, within a minute or two of leaving the oven. Left to cool on the mould, the shrinking pastry grips the metal and cracks when forced.
- Fill at the last momentFill only when completely cold, and preferably within an hour of serving. Whipped cream in a puff shell softens the interior quickly. The recipe tells us only that these were peddled on trays, not when they were filled.
- The creamCream whipped to firm peaks with a little sugar and vanilla; confectioners' sugar in place of granulated helps it hold. Pipe it in from both ends so the tube fills without air pockets.
- YieldOne pound of puff paste, rolled thin, gives about 16 to 20 horns of this size. Reckon two per person.
Cannelon is generally traced to French canne/cannelle, a reed or tube, and the same word turns up in nineteenth-century cookery for savoury rolled meat as well as sweet pastry cases. Adelaide Keen's book collects dishes gathered on European travels, and this entry is doing something the more formal cookbooks of the period rarely did: recording what was actually sold in the street. Cream horns of this general pattern were familiar in French, Austrian and British pastry shops around 1900, and a comparable shape appears in the Italian cannolo (though that shell is fried, not puff paste) and the Austrian Schaumrolle. The note that they are peddled on trays is the useful detail: puff pastry filled with unwhipped-out cream does not keep long, which is consistent with baking in quantity and filling near the point of sale.