French Provincial Cooking (106 page)

Alternatively, serve the French tinned chestnuts in syrup in the same fashion. Either way, this is a dessert for the very rich or the very extravagant.

Cut a slice off the thick end of a Cantaloup, Charentais or Cavaillon melon and keep it aside. Remove the seeds and scoop out the flesh, taking care not to damage the skin. Cut the flesh into cubes and mix with
lb. to 1 lb. of wild or wood strawberries. Add a little sugar and 2 or 3 tablespoons of port. Return the mixture to the melon, put back the top slice, surround the melon with plenty of cracked ice and leave for several hours before serving. Do not put it in the refrigerator, as the powerful aroma of melon penetrates all other foodstuffs.

An alternative filling to wild strawberries and port is a mixture of raspberries and Kirsch or Grand Marnier.

I quote this recipe from Madame Seignobos
³¹
because in composition it has a good deal of resemblance to our own Summer Pudding, and anyone lucky enough to have a mulberry tree in his garden may like to try it:

 

‘Cook 2
lb. of mulberries in a syrup composed of 1 lb. of sugar and
pint of water, then sieve them.

‘In a round china vessel arrange slices of stale crumb of bread in several superimposed layers, pour the mulberry purée over and leave in the cellar to cool.

‘When the bread has imbibed all the syrup, which is to say after 24 hours, turn it out on to a
compotier
and mask the pudding with a vanilla-flavoured cream.’

The best peaches for this dish are the yellow-fleshed variety.

Dip the fruit in boiling water so that the skins can easily be peeled off. Slice them straight into big wine-glasses, sprinkle with sugar and pour a tablespoon or two of white wine into each glass. Don’t prepare them too long ahead or the fruit will go mushy.

I have never very greatly appreciated cooked apple dishes, but from the French I learned two valuable lessons about them. First, choose hard sweet apples whenever possible instead of the sour cooking variety which are used for English apple dishes. And secondly, if the apples are to be eaten hot, cook them in butter instead of in water. The scent of apples cooking in butter is alone more than worth the small extra expense.

For 2 lb., then, of peeled and cored sweet apples, evenly and rather thinly sliced, melt 2 oz. of butter in a frying-pan. Put in your apples, add 3 or 4 tablespoons of soft white sugar (vanilla-flavoured if you like) and cook gently until the apples are pale golden and transparent. Turn the slices over very gently, so as not to break them, and, if they are very closely packed, shake the pan rather than stir the apples. Serve them hot; and I doubt if many people will find cream necessary. The delicate butter taste is enough.

Over the apples cooked as above pour a small glass of warmed Calvados; set light to it and shake the pan until the flames die down.

The Anjou version of the apple dumpling.

Fine large eating apples are peeled and cored, and the cavities filled with plum or quince jam. They are then wrapped in an ordinary tart pastry, the edges well pressed together, each dumpling brushed with milk or cream and baked in a low to moderate oven for about 1 hour.

An alternative to ordinary tart pastry is the
pâte sablée
or crumbly pastry described for the apple tart on page 452. But for 6 apples use twice the quantity of ingredients, divide the pastry into 6 equal pieces and roll each out to a square upon which you place the prepared apple. Fill it with. the jam and draw the edges of the pastry up towards the top. Be sure to moisten all the joins with cold water so that the pastry does not burst in the baking. Place them on a baking sheet and cook them at Gas No. 3, 330 deg. F. for just over an hour.
Les bourdaines
make a dish of great charm for children.

A method of making the most cast iron of cooking pears very delicious. It is especially suitable for those households where there is a solid fuel cooker of the Aga or Esse type.

Peel the pears, leaving the stalks on. Put them in a tall fireproof dish, or earthenware crock. Add about 3 oz. of sugar per pound of pears. Half cover with red wine. Fill to the top with water. Bake in a very slow oven for anything between 5 and 7 hours, until the pears are quite tender and the juice greatly reduced. From time to time, as the wine diminishes, turn the pears over.

A big dish of these pears, almost mahogany-coloured by the time they are ready, served cold in their remaining juice with cream or creamed rice separately, makes a lovely sweet. The best way to present them is to pile them up in a pyramid, stalks uppermost, in a shallow bowl or a
compotier
on a pedestal.

For this you need slightly unripe dessert pears. Peel 2 lb. of them, slice them into quarters or eighths and cut out the cores. Melt a small piece of butter, about
oz., in a shallow flameproof dish, in which the pears should fit as nearly as possible in one layer only. Put in the pears and add 4 to 6 tablespoons of white sugar and a piece of vanilla pod. Simmer very gently until the pears are soft, which will take 5 to 10 minutes if the pears are nearly ripe, 20 to 25 if they are hard. Pour in 4 to 6 tablespoons of thick cream and cook another minute or two, shaking the pan until the cream thickens. Transfer to a moderate oven for a few minutes until a golden skin has formed on the surface.

Serve hot, preferably in the dish in which they have cooked.

Fresh, slightly unripe plums are cooked in the oven in the same way as the apricots described on page 437, but usually they need less water, more sugar, and they will cook rather more quickly; all these factors, however, depend upon the variety, the size and comparative ripeness of the plums used. It is an excellent method of dealing with almost any sort of plums but, best of all, for large ones, purple, yellow or green.

This is simply the old recipe for
crème Chantilly—
sweetened and flavoured whipped cream. This version comes from the celebrated
Cuisinier Royal,
1828 edition.

 

‘Into a tureen put some good cream and a proportionate quantity of powdered sugar, a pinch of gum arabic, a little orange flower water; whip all with a whisk made of peeled osier twigs; when the mixture is well swollen, leave it a moment and then take it up, bit by bit, with a skimmer, arranging it in a pyramid on a dish. Garnish round the base with little fillets of candied lemon or green orange peel and serve.’

 

The proportion of sugar to whipped cream should always be very small, just enough to slightly sweeten it, for the sugar melts in the cream, turns it grainy and watery and spoils its appearance. Personally, I do not bother about the gum arabic. One seldom needs to make whipped cream so long in advance that it needs stiffening.

Hull
lb. of strawberries and sieve them to a pulp, reserving half a dozen. Whisk
pint of double cream, fold in one stiffly whisked egg white, then the strawberry pulp. Add a little caster sugar, about 2 or 3 tablespoons. Arrange the cream piled up in a shallow bowl; stir in the reserved whole strawberries before serving. Enough for four people.

This is a most exquisite cream which can also be made with raspberries or, most beautiful of all,
fraises des bois.
The recipe comes from a dictionary of French cooking of the period of the Second Empire.