by James Steen
In the 1800s the British began to call this dessert crème brûlée, preferring its elegant, poetic mystique and the charm of all things French. In recent years British restaurant menus often revert to burnt cream. Whatever the name, the dish is easy to make but simple to get wrong.
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Digressing for a moment on the subject of coffee, Louis XV was a renowned philanthropist. During a lengthy reign (1715–1774) his seduction technique involved rustling up pots of astonishingly good coffee. Even more impressive, the coffee was not only made by him, but also grown by him, in the botanical gardens at his Palace of Versailles. He roasted it, too. The wondrous whiff of the monarch’s roasted beans enticed scores of soon-to-be mistresses to visit his chambers.
And to think that only a century or so earlier, coffee was the subject of complaints from priests to Pope Clement VIII – they condemned it as the ‘bitter creation of Satan’. Pope Clement, a true Florentine, shooed them away. He happened to love his coffee, so much so that he blessed it. This horrified the priests but ensured that from that moment Catholics could happily drink it and sleep well at night. Or not, depending on their level of caffeine consumption before bedtime.
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Making crème brûlées is a good way for the cook to train her- or himself to think in terms of proportions and ratios of ingredients.
Mastering this technique can remove the necessity to have a cookery book at your side in the kitchen. Recipes and quantities of ingredients will become easy to remember.
Begin by breaking down the recipe of crème brûlée as if cooking for one. So the ingredients for one crème brûlée are:
1 egg yolk
1 dessert spoon caster sugar
½ cup double cream
Plus, vanilla and sugar for the glaze.
Is that easier to remember than a recipe for six? After that, it is merely a matter of multiplication to get to the amount of ingredients needed, depending on the number of guests.
To make crème brûlée for six …
Preheat the oven to 140˚C.
Pour three cups of cream into a saucepan. Add two vanilla pods, split lengthways and halved. Gently bring them to the boil.
Remove the pods. On a plate or plastic chopping board, use a teaspoon to scrape out the vanilla seeds. Return the seed and the pods to the hot cream, allowing them to infuse for fifteen minutes.
In a large bowl, mix six eggs with six dessert spoons of caster sugar.
Remove the pods from the cream and bring the cream back to the boil. When the cream bubbles, pour it into the bowl, whisking constantly (to avoid scrambled egg).
Return this egg-cream mixture to the saucepan. On the lowest heat, stir until the custard is thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon (rather than running off it).
Remove the pan from the heat. Pour the custard through a fine-meshed sieve into a jug. Pour the custard from the jug into six ramekins, filling each one by three quarters.
Create a bain-marie in which to bake the brûlées. To do this, line a large, deep roasting tin or Pyrex dish with cardboard (a brown cardboard box is ideal). Place the ramekins on top of the board. Pour recently boiled water into the tin/dish so that it comes halfway up the side of the ramekins. Carefully – so as not to let the water spill into the ramekins – place the roasting tin in the preheated oven. Bake for about 40 minutes.
Allow the brûlées to cool before placing them in the fridge to chill.
At least an hour before serving, place the ramekins on a baking tray. Sprinkle caster or brown sugar over the brûlées.
Place the baking tray under a hot grill so that the sugar browns and caramelises. Or use a cook’s blow torch to achieve the same effect, browning from the outside and working towards the centre.
Allow the caramel to cool. Sprinkle over another layer of sugar. Repeat the caramel process, under a grill or with a blow torch.
Allow to cool before serving, though never in the fridge as the glaze will melt.
The custard can be made well in advance, of course, and stored in the fridge, covered with a layer of cling film on the surface to prevent a skin forming.
Note: The bain-marie prevents the brûlées overheating and obtaining a ‘grainy’ thickness. But they can be made without use of a bain-marie, by being baked for 50 minutes in an oven preheated to the lower temperature of 100˚C. The cream can be replaced by a mixture of half milk, half cream.
CHEESECAKE
Conceived in Greece in ancient times, this is a much-loved dessert in Britain and an American icon. Smooth creamy top on a crunchy base.
Cheesecake was a favourite of the ancient Greeks. It is believed that athletes ate it before competing in the first Olympic Games (776 BC), and this type of cake was popular at weddings and celebratory feasts. Fresh feta cheese was pounded until smooth, and then mixed with honey.
The Romans added eggs and flour to the recipe, and possibly bay leaves. They called it libum, and introduced the cake to other parts of Europe. In England, The Forme of Cury (the 14th-century recipe book compiled by Richard II’s chefs) has this recipe for ‘tart de bry’: semi-soft cheese is mixed with egg yolks, ginger, sugar, saffron and salt; the mixture is spooned into a pastry shell and then baked.
Elizabeth Raffald observed in the 1700s: ‘A moderate oven bakes them best. If it is too hot it burns them and takes off the beauty, and a very slow oven makes them sad and look black. Make your cheesecakes up just when the oven is of a proper heat and they will rise well and be of a proper colour.’
What we now know as cream cheese was created in the 1870s, and became an essential ingredient in the New York-style cheesecake, now an iconic American dessert. It is said that a New York dairyman called William Lawrence accidentally made the first cream cheese as they were trying to replicate French Neufchatel. Inadvertently, Lawrence produced a cheese which was rich and creamy enough for him to name it cream cheese. The Empire Cheese Company of New York began producing the Philadelphia brand of cream cheese.
This brand was acquired by James Kraft, who devised a method of pasteurising cheese, keeping it well preserved and enabling it to be exported. Born in Ontario, Kraft began his cheese business in Chicago with $65 and a rented horse-drawn wagon. Today the Kraft Heinz company has sales of $27 billion.
The best cheesecakes are made from a simple recipe, very much like this one …
Serves 6
Ingredients
110 grams crème fraîche
800 grams cream cheese
110 grams caster sugar
1 egg
1 vanilla pod, scraped
120 grams digestive biscuits
50 grams butter, melted
Pre-heat the oven to 150˚C.
In a large bowl, mix the crème fraîche, cream cheese, sugar, egg and vanilla seeds.
Crush the biscuits. Heat the butter in a saucepan or on a low setting in the microwave. Mix the biscuits and butter.
Place the crushed, buttery biscuits in the bottom of a twelve-centimetre baking tin, and spread evenly. Spoon the cheese mixture on top of the biscuit base and spread it evenly.
Bake for 25 minutes in the oven. The cheesecake should not colour during cooking.
Note: Vanilla bean paste is excellent and widely available in supermarkets. Use one dessertspoon of the paste instead of the seeds of one vanilla pod. The paste is sugary; so if using reduce the amount of sugar in this recipe to 100 grams.
BAKLAVA AND TURKISH COFFEE
A sweet taste of the Ottoman Empire; thin pastry, nuts and syrup.
The Turkish have an old proverb: ‘The heart seeks neither coffee nor the coffee house; the heart seeks a friend. Coffee is just an excuse.’
The Turkish are devout coffee drinkers, and their coffee is strong. It is served with a glass of water, there to cleanse the palate before drinking the coffee.
They were ahead of the British with their coffee culture. The first coffee houses of the Ottoman Empire were opened in the 1530s, in Aleppo and Damascus, and t
hen in the Turkish capital, Istanbul, in 1554 (about a century before England’s first coffee house).
Traditionally, a piece of Turkish delight (locum) was eaten, to remove the bitterness of the coffee. Another Turkish saying goes: ‘A cup of bitter coffee brings 40 years of friendship.’ That was at a time when coffee was made without sugar. As sugar became more readily available in the 1700s, it became an ingredient in the coffee-making process. So the coffee is sweet, but Turkish delight is still served in keeping with the custom.
Turkish coffee is made like this: two cups of drinking water are poured into a cezve (Turkish coffee boiler); add two teaspoons of fine ground coffee and sugar to taste; over a low heat, stir the coffee and when froth appears it is poured into cups; the remaining coffee is boiled and poured when it froths.
To tell the fortune of a coffee drinker: when the coffee is finished, hold the cup above the drinker’s head and rotate it. The cup, not the head. Then turn the cup upside down on a saucer as the drinker simultaneously makes a wish.
You need to look at the traces of ground coffee in the cup and on the saucer to assess the future for the coffee drinker. Seeing mountains means travel, a fish suggests the drinker will become wealthy, a bird symbolises the imminence of news, and a horse means the drinker’s wish will come true.
All of this can take place while taking bites of a slice of baklava, the sweet and nutty pastry of the Middle East.
Nuts – pistachios, walnuts, almonds – are pounded with cardamom and the zest of lemon and/or orange until coarse (not powdery), and coated in melted butter. The nutty mixture is spread between thin sheets of filo pastry and baked at about 160˚C. Then the pastry is brushed with syrup – made with sugar, water, a little rosewater and lemon juice. This is followed by a second baking at 190˚C, for just a few minutes to fasten the syrup glaze. Honey can be used instead of syrup, or blended with the syrup.
Baklava’s origins may lie in either of these dishes: the Ancient Greek plakous (cheese and honey between layers of pastry) or the Turkish dessert güllaç (layers of nuts and honey between filo pastry) which features in the 14th-century book of food, drink and medicine by Hu Sihui, physician to the Mongol court.
PAVLOVA
Whipped cream and fruit in a large shell of meringue. Beautiful and celebratory. But should it be berries or kiwi fruit, and was it really created in the Antipodes?
Ligovo is an ancient suburb in the south of St Petersburg and is where, in February, 1881, a young, unmarried laundress called Lyubov gave birth to a daughter, Anna. The father’s identity remains a mystery, although there have been suggestions that he was a Jewish banker. Lyubov married one Matvey Pavlov, providing Anna with a stepfather, and with the surname she would adopt; a name that would also come to be associated with one of the world’s great desserts, Pavlova.
By the age of eleven, Anna Pavlova was appearing in ballet on stage. Slightly awkward in pose (a small body with long legs) she was nicknamed ‘The Broom’ by fellow students, but she was chosen for the Imperial Ballet. From there, young Anna became a sensation. She was swooned over by critics and audiences.
She is best known, perhaps, for her creation of the Dying Swan in the penultimate movement of The Carnival of the Animals. Over the course of her career she performed this dance some 4,000 times … and, of course, with her notoriously weak ankles. (On her deathbed she whispered: ‘Bring my swan costume.’)
In 1912, Anna moved to Britain, and to North London, settling in a large house – complete with a small lake and swans, of course – in Golders Green. By now she was a successful touring prima ballerina, travelling around the world to perform on stages with her own dance company.
And that is what she did in 1926, when she boarded a ship and began the five-week voyage to Australia, heading first to Melbourne, where fans had travelled hundreds of miles to see her. She was a hit. From there, she went to Sydney, greeted at the railway station by thousands of onlookers. And after a few weeks of performing in Sydney she sailed with her ballet company to New Zealand. There, she performed in a theatre in Wellington and stayed – pertinent to this story – in a hotel in the city.
At some point, before she returned to Australia to complete the tour, the hotel’s chef presented her with ‘The Pavlova Cake’. Or so the story goes. In Australia, meanwhile, it is claimed the dish was created during the ballerina’s second Australian tour in 1929.
For decades the two countries have squabbled over the pavlova, each adamant that the dessert was created on its shores.
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Among those squabbling were Dr Paul Wood, a New Zealander academic, author, art historian and culture critic, and Annabelle Utrecht, an Australian with a background in media and also owner of a food retail outlet.
Their disagreement arose in 2014, during a conversation on Facebook, when Annabelle claimed the pavlova cake to be an Australian dessert. Andrew pinged a response, declaring it was New Zealand’s culinary achievement, referring to the publication of a pavlova cake recipe in the New Zealand Dairy Exporter annual on 10 October 1929. Their cyberspace row was driven by national pride and they set out to prove each other wrong.
A few days later they touched base, this time in a more conciliatory fashion. They had both stumbled upon evidence which seemed to point to an entirely different point of origin from what they had always taken for granted: that pavlova was an antipodean ‘invention’.
They became a pair of pavlova fanatics, and teamed up to research the origins of the dessert. On their database of recipes, they have amassed 2,300 pavlova-related entries. And they are writing a book about their adventure and their discoveries. The working title is Beat It Stiff: The Secret History Of The Pavlova.
Annabelle, the Miss Marple of meringue, recalls:
From the outset it was clear that the pavlova cake was neither an original dessert presentation, nor a southern hemisphere innovation. To be honest, we were both shocked by that initial revelation and it set us on a course of dedicated research. Two and a half years have passed now, and we’ve uncovered an entirely new history to the pavlova dessert.
Until the project began, she did not often eat pavlova.
My mother is German and emigrated to Australia in the late 1950s. Mum is a wonderful cook, who wastes nothing and believes you must respect ingredients and always cook with love. I once watched her walk away hungry from a sandwich shop and asked why she didn’t purchase one. Her answer was straightforward, ‘They didn’t make them with love.’
In terms of desserts, mum’s repertoire was more likely to include traditional Germanic sweets like strudel, streusel kuchen, yeast cakes or vanillekipferl (although she has become somewhat legendary in the lamington department over the years). Growing up, my favourite desserts were those of my mother’s, or aunts – often simple things like apple pancakes, Berliner, cherry clafoutis or flaugnardes. But if a slice of pavlova came my way, I’d happily consume it!
Annabelle made her first pavlova in her twenties (for an Australia Day celebration) but did not bake another until the great pavlova research project began. ‘Technically though,’ she says, ‘I don’t make pavlovas. I only bake the recipes we would call a pavlova today – those which have been hidden in historic cook books under alternate names. I should make a significant point here. The pavlova is merely a rebranding of an historic cake that has been in existence for a very long time.’
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And so she took me through the pavlova files:
‘Our research has revealed that the cake we call a pavlova today, was in existence for at least a century before any Antipodean recipes emerge.
‘In fact, large-form meringues topped with whipped cream and fruit were not only present in the European and North American culinary dialogues, but quite fashionable during the 19th century. And they became even more popular at the turn of the 20th century. Of course, they were not called “pavlova” then. Rather, they manifested under a variety of equally charming or practical epithets.’
Petite me
ringues filled with whipped cream and fruits can be found in European recipe books dating back to the 18th century, says Annabelle:
‘The larger scale meringue constructions filled with combinations of whipped cream, nuts or fruit preserves – sometimes referred to as “ornamental cakes” – begin to commonly reveal themselves in the early 19th century recipe books of the Austro-Hungarian empire and other German-speaking lands. We say German-speaking lands because Germany as a nation did not exist until 1871.’
The Spanische windtorte (a very fancy meringue cake filled with flavoured whipped cream and fruit) emerged from the royal court of the Habsburgs, and not long after, pavlova-like cakes begin to appear in Europe under various names.
These include tourte aux meringues, baisertorte and a variant of the schaum Torte (German for foam cake.) These incredibly time-consuming and elaborate manifestations, she says, were originally the product of aristocratic kitchens. Quickly, they became popular dishes with the well-heeled, making their way into the cookbooks of the Germanic middle-classes.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, political and economic turmoil in Europe motivated waves of mass migration into the United States. Between 1820 and the First World War, almost 6 million Germans migrated to the USA – and with them came their crafts, traditions and, of course, recipe books.
Annabelle continues: ‘By the 1860s, what emerges in areas of dense Germanic settlement, like the US Midwest, is the presence of cakes identical in every way to the pavlova of today. In fact, the modern American schaum torte is still a beloved and extremely popular regional dessert in US states like Wisconsin and Iowa.’