French Provincial Cooking (110 page)

The pastry is filled with the fruit, only a little of the juice being used. Cook as for the savoury tarts, but 5 minutes before taking them from the oven, pour in a mixture of 1 egg beaten with a few tablespoons of thick cream.

A
galette
takes many forms. It can be a flat pastry, a cake special to Twelfth Night celebrations, a preparation of thinly sliced potatoes browned on both sides in a frying-pan or a variety of
petit four.

This
galette
is made with a yeast dough and covered with previously cooked fruit, plums, apples, quinces, apricots, whatever happens to be in season. It is always much liked as a pudding course but it is rather filling so is perhaps best served when the rest of the meal has been rather light.

Ingredients for the dough are 5 oz. plain flour,
oz, baker’s yeast, 1
oz. butter, 1 egg, salt.

Soften the butter and beat it thoroughly but lightly into the flour; add a good pinch of salt, the whole egg and the yeast dissolved to a paste in a very little tepid water. Mix with your hands until all ingredients are well amalgamated, add a little more water if necessary, knead into a bun shape, put on a floured plate, make a deep crosswise incision on the top, cover with a cloth and leave to rise somewhere warm, such as the airing cupboard or near the boiler, for 2 hours.

In the meantime, prepare the fruit; for plums or apricots, make a cut along the natural division of the. fruit, allowing 1
lb. Put them in a slow oven with about 6 oz. of sugar and not more than a tablespoon of water, and bake them until soft enough for the stones to be extracted. For apples, use the same quantity, peel, core and slice them, cook them very gently in a frying-pan with butter (this makes a huge difference to the final flavour), sugar and a little water, and watch out that they don’t get too much cooked and so lose their shape.

When the dough has risen, and in 2 hours it should have doubled in volume, work it again for a minute or so, sprinkling it with flour to make it drier and cooler to handle. Form it again into a bun, and place it in the centre of a lightly-oiled flan case or tart tin about 8 inches in diameter. Press it out with your hands until it covers the whole case. Spread the fruit on top, arranging it neatly in circles and filling the pastry amply but not using too much juice, which would overflow. Put the flan tin on a baking sheet; cook in a preheated oven at Gas No. 4 or 5, 360 to 380 deg. F., for 35 to 40 minutes. During the last 10 minutes, strew extra sugar on the top. Leave to settle a few minutes after taking from the oven. It is best served hot.

An added refinement is to pour on top of the fruit, 5 minutes before the end of the cooking time, a mixture of 2 oz. of cream and a well-beaten yolk of egg, and let it just barely set.

Those inexperienced with yeast cookery need not be alarmed; nothing is easier than to make this dough once you have done it two or three times, and the combination of the juicy fruit seeping into the bread-like paste is particularly good. But, of course, if preferred, an undercrust of simple pastry will do instead of the yeast dough.

Cook 1
lb. of sweet apples as for
pommes au beurre.
Make a
pâte
sablée
or crumbly pastry by rubbing 3 oz. of butter into 6 oz. of plain flour, a quarter-teaspoon of salt and 3 teaspoons of white sugar. Moisten with 2 to 4 tablespoons of ice-cold water. If it is still too dry, add a little more, but the less water you use the more crumbly and light your pastry will be.

Simply shape the pastry into a ball and immediately, without leaving it to rest or even rolling it out, spread it with your hands into a lightly buttered 8-inch flan tin. Brush the edges with thin cream or milk; arrange the apples, without the juice, in overlapping circles, keeping a nicely-shaped piece for the centre. Bake, with the tin on a baking sheet, in a preheated hot oven at Gas No. 6, 400 deg. F., for 30 to 35 minutes, turning the tin round once during the cooking. Take it from the oven, pour in the buttery juices, which have been reheated, give another sprinkling of sugar and return to the oven for barely a minute.

Although it is at its best hot, this pastry will not go sodden even when it is cold.

An excellent and comparatively simple chestnut sweet which is half pudding, half cake.

Shell and skin 1 lb. of chestnuts as described on page 263. Cover them with half milk and half water and simmer them very gently until they are very soft, which will take about an hour. Drain off the liquid. Sieve the chestnuts. To the resulting purée add a syrup made from 3 oz. of white sugar and 2 or 3 tablespoons of water, then 2 oz. of softened butter. When this mixture is thoroughly amalgamated, turn it into a rectangular mould of
pint or 1 pint capacity. (An ice-tray from the refrigerator is a good substitute if you have no small loaf tin.) This should first be very lightly brushed with oil. (Sweet almond oil, to be bought from chemists, is ideal). Leave until next day in the refrigerator or larder. To turn it out, run a knife round the edges and ease out the cake.

Cover it with the following mixture: break up 3 oz. of plain chocolate and melt it on a fireproof plate in the oven, with 4 or 5 lumps of sugar and 2 or 3 tablespoons of water. Stir it smooth; add 1 oz. of butter. Let it cool a little, then with a palette knife cover the whole cake with the chocolate, smoothing it with a knife dipped in water. Leave it to set before serving. Ample for four.

This is the simplest sort of old-fashioned plain cake, saved from dryness by a coffee-cream filling, and admirable to serve with creams and ices.

To make the cake, beat 3 oz. of vanilla sugar with 3 yolks of eggs until the mixture is very creamy. Add 3 oz. of flour and then fold in the stiffly-whipped whites of the eggs. Turn into a lightly buttered oblong cake tin (1
-pint capacity) and bake in a moderate oven, Gas No. 4, 355 to 560 deg. F., for 30 minutes. Turn the cake out upside down on to a cake rack a few minutes after taking it from the oven.

To make the cream filling, work 3 oz. of butter with the yolk of an egg; add 3 oz. of sieved icing sugar; when the cream is smooth stir in a dessertspoon of very strong black coffee (nowadays the most convenient method is to use soluble coffee powder mixed to a thin paste).

Slice the cake into three or four layers. Spread each liberally with the coffee cream and reshape the cake. Press lightly as you put each layer back, so that the slices will stick together. Leave for some hours before serving.

This is a cake which can also be eaten as a pudding, and is neither expensive nor difficult to make.

lb. bitter chocolate,
lb. caster sugar, 2 tablespoons of flour, 3 eggs, 3 oz. butter.