Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (40 page)

Extract the vanilla bean from the apples, turn these into a big bowl, beat them to a purée – there is no necessity to put them through a sieve. Quickly whisk in the very well beaten eggs. These must be thoroughly amalgamated with the apple purée and the whole mixture vigorously whisked. Turn it into the caramel-coated mould, place this, covered with a plate or saucepan lid if it has no cover of its own, in a baking dish filled with water. Ideally, the water should come nearly to the top of the mould.

Cook the pudding low down in the oven, and at a low temperature, 150C°/300°F/gas mark 2, for just about one hour, or until the top is firmly set, but still a little soft to the touch.

Leave the mould in its baking tin for 15 minutes. Then transfer it to the refrigerator.

Turn out the pudding only shortly before you intend to serve it and replace the mould over it to prevent it from spreading. Fresh cream can be offered with apple caramel but is by no means necessary – on the contrary, the apple and egg mixture is itself rather like a creamy and delicate custard, and the coating of liquidised caramel on the top and running down the sides gives it the necessary interest. Cream or a sauce is really a mistake, but what makes a wonderful combination is a glass of sweet Sauternes or other dessert wine, well chilled.

Notes

1. 1. The capacity of the mould is important. The apple and egg mixture should fill it almost to the top. If too large a mould is used the pudding will flop when it is turned out.
   
2. 2. Covering the mould is important.
   
3. 3. Cooking the apples as soon as they are sliced is important. If they are left until they start turning brown, the appearance – if not the flavour – of the pudding is spoiled.
   
4. 4. The quality of the apples is important. I use a mixture of sweet and sharp, say 4 Cox’s orange pippins to 2 Granny Smiths, or 1 large Bramley cooking apple. In the latter case reduce the amount of water used for cooking the apples or the mixture will be too wet. When this happens the pudding collapses when you turn it out.
   

APPLE CARAMEL
(2)

This is a variation of the first recipe. The ingredients are the same, the method and the effect rather different.

Instead of using the caramel to line the mould, it is poured over the cooked and chilled apple custard. As the pudding is served from the mould in which it is cooked, choose a glass or porcelain soufflé dish rather than a metal mould. The capacity should be the same – 1 litre (1¾ pints) – but a wider, shallower shape is preferable.

Prepare and cook the apples as described above. Beat in the
eggs, turn into the mould, poach the mixture as in the first recipe. Leave in the refrigerator overnight, or for several hours.

Make the caramel with 6 tablespoons each of sugar and water, just as for coating a mould. Pour it sizzling over the whole surface of the ice-cold apple custard. It will set instantly, forming a thin, brittle covering, as though a clear amber-coloured glass plate had been set over the apple cream.

Cover the dish until it is time to serve it. This should be within a couple of hours, before the caramel turns soft.

APRICOT CARAMEL

This is made in the same way as apple caramel.

Ingredients for the apricot custard are 350 g (12 oz) of dried apricots, 4 whole eggs, 2 tablespoons of honey and the juice of half a lemon.

The caramel is made and the 14-cm (5½-in) charlotte mould coated as explained above.

Soak the apricots for a couple of hours in just enough water to cover them. Cook them in the same water, and without sugar, in a covered casserole in a slow oven for about one hour or until they are swollen and very soft, and all but a spoonful or two of the water evaporated.

Put the apricots into the blender bowl or goblet. Add the honey, the lemon juice and the eggs. Spin to a thick purée. While still warm pour it into the prepared mould. Cover and cook as for the apple caramel, but for a little longer, say an extra 10 minutes.

Serve well chilled with fresh pouring cream.

Note

Dried apricots make a thicker, more solid mixture than apples, so the apricot caramel has a very different consistency, something like that of a soft, moist cake. It holds its shape well.

CRÈME RENVERSÉE AU CARAMEL

This is the beloved crème caramel of French household and restaurant cooking. Under the name of
flan
it is also the favourite pudding of Spain. Even in very humble Spanish restaurants it is rare, or so I have found, to come across a
flan
not made with good fresh milk and eggs.

For a crème caramel to serve 4 people, use a charlotte mould of i-litre (1¾-pint) capacity, as described above for the apple caramel.

Make the caramel with the same quantities – 6 tablespoons each of sugar and water – and coat the mould.

Ingredients for the custard are 600 ml (1 pint) of rich milk, 2 whole eggs and 3 yolks, 60 g (2 oz) of sugar, a half vanilla bean
or
a bay leaf
or
a strip of lemon peel.

To make the custard put the milk, sugar and chosen flavouring (it’s hard to choose. On the whole I prefer the bay leaf which gives out a subtle scent of bitter almond) into a 1½- or 2-litre (3–4-pint) saucepan. Bring the milk very slowly to simmering point.

Whisk the eggs in a bowl big enough to hold the milk as well; having extracted the bay leaf, vanilla bean or lemon peel, pour in the hot milk, whisking vigorously, or use an electric blender if you prefer.

Strain the egg and milk mixture into the mould. Cover it. Stand it in a deep baking tin filled with hot water. Transfer it to the lower shelf of the oven. Cook at 150°C/300°F/gas mark 2 for 1½ hours – a little less, a little more. The cream should be firm but still very slightly trembly. Leave the mould in its baking tin for 15 minutes before transferring it to the refrigerator.

Turn out the crème caramel only shortly before you intend to serve it.

Note

See also
the notes to apple caramel. The proportions of whole egg and yolks are only important to crème caramel.

Søndags B-T
, Denmark, May 1976

Crème brûlée

The hors-d’oeuvre course of a grand dinner is hardly the place you would expect to find mention of a crème brûlée. Yet in seventeenth-century France, at any rate in the inner circles of Louis XIV’s opulent court, that charming custard pudding did figure among the dishes which constituted the hors-d’oeuvre.

It must be explained, though, that in those days hors-d’oeuvre were not at all what they became two centuries later, a selection of cold dishes served as a preliminary to the midday meal, nor were they at all the same manner of dish. Rather they were a mixture of sweet and savoury morsels, light vegetable dishes, veal loaves, sweetbreads, pigeons with fennel or basil, pigs’ trotters, fritters and the like, plus confections such as orange creams and blanc-manges of almonds, chicken and rice flour. These delicacies seem to have been an extension of, and on occasion interchangeable with, the
entremets
which followed the roasts of poultry and game, and which concluded the second service of the meal proper. In other words the hors-d’oeuvre were extra titbits and, as the term implies, outside the main business of the dinner. They were evidently provided at grand banquets to keep the company amused and to give them something to peck at during the long interval between courses, so were left on the table until the next service was brought on.

To many people the hors-d’oeuvre and the
entremets
must have been the best parts of those staggeringly tedious three-hour banquets, still conceived very much in the pattern of medieval and early Renaissance feasts, although no doubt the ingredients and the cooking were by now somewhat more refined.

In his influential
Cuisinier Roïal et Bourgeois
, 1691, Massialot gives accounts of several ceremonial dinners held during the previous year, his book being right up to the minute in informing the public what the royal family of France and their immediate entourage were served at banquets.

The dessert fruits and conserves which made up the Third Service were not included in Massialot’s book, being the concern of the confectioner rather than of the cook. The creams, the custards, and the fruit tarts, however, were the responsibility of the kitchen proper – or so Massialot asserts – and he duly provides receipts. ‘There is Cream of Almond, Cream of Pistachios, Crème brûlée, Crackling Creams, fried creams, and Italian creams, and still many others’.

Most of Massialot’s creams are based on custards made with milk, eggs and the chosen flavourings. Here is the 1702 English translation of his receipt for crème brûlée. It was possibly on this receipt that many subsequent English versions were based, although the idea of burnt cream can hardly have been new since it had been known in Italy for about two hundred years. As was
also the case with French and Italian milk-based ices, English cooks went one better, and replaced the milk with cream.

BURNT CREAM

Take four or five Yolks of Eggs, according to the bigness of your Dish or Plate; and beat them well in a stew-pan, with as much Flower as you can take up between your Fingers; pouring in Milk by degrees to the quantity of about a Quart:
¹
then put into it a small Stick of Cinnamon, with some green Lemmon-peel cut small and likewise some candy’d Orange-peel may also be minc’d as that of Lemmon, and then ’tis call’d
Burnt Cream with Orange
. To render it more delicious, pounded Pistachoes or Almonds may be added, with a little Orange-flower-water. Then set your Cream upon the Furnace, and stir it continually, taking care that it do not stick to the bottom. When it is well boil’d, set a Dish or Plate upon a Furnace, and having pour’d the Cream into it, let it boil again, till you perceive it to stick to the side of the Dish. Then it being set aside, and well sugar’d on the top, besides the Sugar that is put into it; take the Fire-shovel heated red-hot, to give it a fine Gold-colour. To garnish it make use of
Feuillantins
small
Fleurons
or
Meringues
, or other cut Pastry-works of crackling crust. Ice your Cream if you please, or else let it be serv’d up otherwise, always among the Intermesses.’

The Court and Country Cook

The English translation is not very faithful to Massialot. Apart from the discrepancy in the quantity of milk noted above, the translator changed a direction to draw the dish of thickened custard to the back of the stove into ‘set it aside’ and rendered ‘if not, serve it without that’ – ie without the icing, as ‘let it be serv’d up otherwise’. No doubt the translator was baffled as to how you would ice your cream when it is already covered with a glaze of burnt sugar. I think that when Massialot said ‘ice your cream’ he simply meant you could sprinkle it with very finely powdered sugar, the equivalent of today’s confectioners’ sugar. Or did he meant set it on ice?

Recipes for Burnt Cream began to appear in English cookery books and manuscripts during the first half of the eighteenth century.

TO MAKE BURNT CREAM

This is an unusual version in that the Cream is served hot. It comes from the ms. receipt book of a Mrs Machen of Bloxworth, near Bere Regis, dated 1710 to
c
1750 and was published in
Dorset Dishes of the 18th Century
, ed. J. Stevens Cox, 1961.

‘Take the yolks of four Eggs, one spoonfull of flower, a little orange flower water, beat it together, then put in a pint of cream and as much Sugar as will sweeten it, stir it together, put in a stick of Cinnamon, and set it on a gentle fire, keeping it stirring till tis pretty thick, then pour it in the dish you serve it up in let it stand till it is as thick as a custard, then sift Duble refin’d Sugar over it, and hold a red hott Sallimander over it till tis burnt pretty Black, servie it up hott.’

The Burnt Cream recipe in Mrs Rundell’s
New System of Domestic Cookery
, first published 1806 is as follows:

Boil a pint (475 ml – being the 16-fl oz pint) of cream with a stick of cinnamon, and some lemon peel; take it off the fire, and pour it very slowly into the yolks of four eggs, stirring till half-cold; sweeten, and take out the spice, etc., pour it into the dish; when cold, strew white powdered sugar over, and brown it with a salamander.

Burnt Cream now disappears from the cookery books for nearly a century. Of the popular household cookery books published during the Victorian era none gives the old recipe. Mrs Rundell’s
New System
was, however, still in circulation. Pirated from John Murray by no fewer than five other publishers, it was reprinted for the sixty-eighth time as late as 1867. Possibly it was via Mrs Rundell or simply as a handed-down tradition that Burnt Cream survived. Emanating, at any rate, from an Aberdeenshire country house, the recipe was offered, so the story goes, by a Victorian undergraduate of Trinity to the college cook, who turned it down. In due course the undergraduate, becoming a Fellow of his old college, came up again with his recipe which this time was accepted, and on its way to fame. According to Miss Eleanor Jenkinson, sister of Frances Jenkinson (1889–1923), who in 1908
published the story and a version of the recipe in her
Ocklye Cookery Book
(a collector’s item, this little book of Edwardian family recipes), the year of the crème brûlée was 1879.

College cooks, it seems, won’t divulge recipes (except perhaps to each other) but Miss Jenkinson’s differs from Mrs Rundell’s only in that the cream and egg mixture is neither sweetened nor flavoured but is returned to the fire to thicken very slightly after the boiling cream has been poured over, and stirred with, the beaten egg yolks. The crust of pounded sugar, spread over the cooled cream and browned with the red hot salamander, should make a hard surface 3 mm (⅛ in) thick and like light brown ice. Miss Jenkinson’s plain unsweetened cream seems to me the best of all the recipes.