French Provincial Cooking (111 page)

Melt the chocolate in the oven; mix it with the softened butter, flour, sugar and beaten egg yolks. Fold in the stiffly-beaten whites. Turn into a buttered 6-inch cake tin or 1
-pint loaf tin and cook in a preheated moderate oven, Gas No. 4, 355 deg. F., for 35 minutes. There will be a thin crust on top of the cake but if you test it with a skewer the inside will appear insufficiently cooked, which in fact is correct, as it gets firmer as it cools.

As soon as it is cool enough to handle, turn upside down on to a cake rack. When cool, the cake can either be iced with the same mixture as described for the chestnut and chocolate cake on page 453, or covered with lightly-whipped cream.

The quantities given make a small cake, but it is somewhat solid and goes quite a long way.

lb. of bitter chocolate, 3 oz. each of butter, caster sugar and ground almonds, 3 eggs, 1 tablespoon each of rum or brandy and black coffee.

Break the chocolate into small pieces; put them with the rum and coffee to melt in a cool oven. Stir the mixture well, put it with the butter, sugar and ground almonds in a saucepan and stir over a low fire for a few minutes until all the ingredients are blended smoothly together. Off the fire, stir in the well-beaten egg yolks, and then fold in the stiffly-whipped whites. Turn into a lightly-buttered shallow sponge-cake tin, of 7 to 8 inches diameter, or a tart tin with a removable base (see page 69). Stand the tin on a baking sheet and cook in a very low oven, Gas No. 1, 290 deg. F., for about 45 minutes. This cake, owing to the total absence of flour, is rather fragile, so turn it out, when it is cool, with the utmost caution. It can either be served as it is, or covered with lightly whipped and sweetened cream. It is a cake which is equally good for dessert or for tea-time.

Here is a nice dish for children, rather different from the ordinary pancakes. Ingredients are 2 large eggs, their weight (which will be 4 to 5 oz.) in butter, flour and sugar, and about
pint of milk, a tablespoon of rum, salt.

Stir the eggs, flour, sugar, a pinch of salt and the just melted butter all together until quite smooth. Gradually add the tepid milk and stir until you have a batter of about the consistency of thick cream.

Grease a heavy iron pan very, very lightly with butter, heat it and make very small pancakes with scarcely more than one tablespoon of the batter at a time. If you have a large pan, two or three little pancakes can be made at the same time, for the batter should be just stiff enough not to run in the pan unless it is tilted. Turn the pancakes over in the usual way and, when they are done on both sides, lift them out with a palette knife. They are nicest eaten with melted butter and sugar.

These quantities make twenty to thirty small pancakes, so they can be halved. The rum, little though it is, makes quite a difference to the flavour as well as to the crispness of the batter, but if you prefer to omit it, flavour the mixture instead with grated lemon or orange peel.

It makes little difference, with this batter, whether the pancakes are made at once or if it is left to stand. And the amount of butter used for cooking them should be infinitesimal.

This system of making red-currant jelly was given by Eliza Acton in her
Modern Cookery,
published in 1845. She says that it is a Norman receipt. It is the one I always use and find it makes, as Eliza Acton says, ‘superlative’ jelly. I was preparing the fruit for it one day when a friend from Paris arrived upon the scene. ‘What on earth,’ she said, ‘are you doing wasting your time taking all the stalks off? At home we put the whole lot in the pan. It all goes through the cloth; the stalks don’t affect it at all.’ In every other detail, she told me, the system she used was the same as Miss Acton’s. Ever since, I have followed her advice. So weigh your ripe red-currants and put them into the preserving pan, stalks and all, with an equal weight of sugar. Then proceed as follows, according to Miss Acton.

‘Boil these together quickly for exactly 8 minutes, keep them stirred all the time and clean off the scum—which will be very abundant—as it rises; then turn the preserve into a very clean sieve, and put into small jars the jelly which runs through it and which will be delicious in flavour and of the brightest colour. It should be carried immediately, when this is practicable, to an extremely cool but not a damp place and left there until perfectly cold. In Normandy, where the fruit is of richer quality than in England, this preserve is boiled only 2 minutes and is both firm and beautifully transparent.’

It was from
marmelo
, the Portuguese name for quince, that the word marmalade came into the French and the English languages.

There are as many different recipes for quince marmalade as there are for orange marmalade. The theory is always much the same; the skin and the pips are used to make a foundation syrup which will jelly, and in which the sliced fruit is cooked.

The following recipe makes a very richly-flavoured preserve, for my taste a good deal superior to orange marmalade.

Rub the whole fruit with a cloth to remove the down; put it in a preserving pan and cover completely with cold water. Simmer until the fruit is soft enough to pierce with a thin skewer; don’t let it cook until the skins break. Extract the fruit, and when cool enough to handle, peel, slice and core it. Return the cores and the skins to the same water in which the fruit has cooked, and boil until reduced by about a third, when the juice will have just begun to take on the characteristic cornelian colour of quince jelly.

Strain this through a cloth. Weigh the sliced fruit; add its equivalent in white sugar. Put the sugar and fruit, together with the strained juice, back into the preserving pan and boil gently until the fruit is soft and translucent and the juice sets to jelly. The best way of ascertaining that the juice will set is to watch until it starts coating the back of the spoon, and slides off with a gentle plop when the spoon is shaken. Skim off any scum that has risen to the surface before turning off the flame. Put into warmed jam jars, cover with a round of paper dipped in brandy and tie down when cool.

Here is the easiest country method of making thick quince paste. Rub the quinces with a cloth to remove the down. Put them, whole and unpeeled, into a big, tall earthenware crock or jar, without any water. Leave them, covered, in a low oven until they are soft but not breaking up. When they are cool enough to handle, slice them, without peeling them, into a bowl, discarding the cores and any bruised or hard pieces. Put the sliced fruit through the food mill. Weigh it. Add an equal quantity of white sugar. Boil in a preserving pan, stirring nearly all the time until the paste begins to candy and come away from the bottom as well as the sides of the pan. Take care to use a long-handled wooden spoon for stirring, and to wrap your hand in a cloth, for the boiling paste erupts and spits. Continue stirring after the heat has been turned off until boiling has ceased. With a big soup ladle, fill shallow rectangular earthenware or tin dishes with the paste. Leave to get quite cold. Next day put these moulds into the lowest possible oven of a solid fuel cooker, or into the plate drawer of a gas or electric stove, while the oven is on, for several hours, until the paste has dried out and is quite firm. Turn out the slabs of paste, wrap them in greaseproof paper and store them in tins in a dry larder.

This paste is cut into squares or lozenges to serve as a dessert or as a sweetmeat for the children.

If you have no suitable utensil for the initial cooking of the fruit in the oven, it can be softened in a steamer over a big saucepan of boiling water.

Peach jams are a speciality of Apt, the centre of the fruit-preserving industry of Provence, but this is a household rather than a commercial recipe. White and yellow peaches are equally good for this jam.

Immerse the fruit in boiling water for a minute and then gently skin them. Extract the stones by pressing firmly with your finger on the stalk end. Cut the peaches in halves. Weigh them. For each pound weigh
lb. of preserving or loaf sugar, and measure
pint of water. Put sugar and water into a preserving pan and bring to the boil. Put in the peaches, and when the sugar has once more come to the boil turn the flame low, and leave them very gently cooking, only just moving, for
hour. Remove from the fire and leave until next day, when the jam is to be boiled as before, very gently, for
hour. If the syrup sets when poured on a plate the jam is cooked. If it is still too thin, remove the fruit, pack it carefully in jars, and continue cooking the syrup until it does set. Skim it when cool, pour it over the fruit, to fill the jars; tie down when cold. A dozen average-size peaches will make sufficient preserve to fill two 1 lb. jars.