Consuming Interest

A Brand for the Burning

By ELIZABETH DAVID

NEVER in France have I come across that beauti- ful and celebrated dish known to us as creme. brulde. I have never met anyone who has. Old French recipes for it may well exist, but I have ` tall never seen one ancient or

modern which could pro- duce the particular com- bination of cream, rich, cold and concealed by a top-coveribg of brittle and glaSsy, browned sugar which is the speciality made famous by the kit- chens of Trinity College, Cambridge.

DolenS of modern English and, American cookery books give recipes for creme br016e. Some of 'these recipes approximate to what is said to be the original, some don't. Those in which the cream is made with milk as for a cus- tard or creme caramel can be dismissed straight away. So can the ones which direct that the cream be cooked in the manner of a baked custard--a method Which however skilfully used, produces

a cream slightly shrunken and with a discernibly grainy texture. Double cream and egg yolks, barely cooked to thickening point, are.the essen-

tial ingredients.

The rest of the story is best conveyed by re- cipes.' As Burnt Cream these began to appear in English cookery .books and manuscripts during the, first half of the eighteenth century and by

the end of it are much. as we know them today. The Burnt Cream recipe in Elizabeth .Rundell's

New System of Domestic. Cookery, first published circa 1800 is as follows :

and a pint of cream with a stick of cinnamon,

and some lemon peel; take it off the lire, 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 house- hold cookery books published during the Vic- torian era none gives the old recipe. Mrs. Run- dell's New System was, however, still in circula- tion. 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. Kundell or simply as a handed-down tradi- tion 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 FelPow .of his old col- lege, came up again with his recipe which this time was accepted, and on its way to fame. According to'a Miss Eleanor Jenkinson, sister of

a one-time Cambridge University Librarian, who in 1908 published the story and a version of the recipe in her Ockive Cookery Book (a collector's item, this little book of Edwardian family recipes) the year of the creme brulee was 1879, A Bal- liol don once told me that his own old college, Merton, had creme bade long before Cambridge ever heard of it, but couldn't supply any dates. A King's, Cambridge, man tells. me that his col- lege's creme brulde knocked splinters off any- body else's.

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

In The Finer Cooking (Heinemann, 1937), Mar- cel Boulestin recounts how, visiting Cambridge, he had creme bad& many times, and notably on the occasion of a pre-1914 luncheon at Trinity given to, precede a performance of The Magic Flute (Rupert Brooke in the choruS), how he attempted without success to make the.dish, to have it made, and to prise the recipe out of Trinity's kitchen. Subsequently, there appeared in a newspaper a letter from Mr. Trevor Blakemore, who said that in 1896 he had been told by Mr. Hartmann, the Swiss chef, for 'many years head cook at Trinity, that he, Hartmann, had himself invented the dish, had stressed that the cream must be serib-liquid and. the caramel. on the top browned to the consistency of thawing ice, on no account to a sticky varnish.

Invent the dish Hartmann clearly did not. Such claims tend to be rash. A creation believed by a chef to be his very own almost invariably turns out to have been brought back from China by Marco Polo, given to Flora Macdonald by Bonnie Prince Charlie, or found by Napoleon in Egypt.

That Hartmann was the cook who perfected either the formula provided by the hero of Miss Jenkinson's tale or a recipe already • used in Trinity's kitchen, and in the process transformed Burnt Cream into crSme brCiled, .seems very pos- sible. When you think of it there is something not quite right about that brillee. In culinary French a cream with a burnt sugar top is more usually glace(' than bailee. (One eighteenth-cen- tury French cream of this kind, containing chocolate and candied lemon and orange flowers, is called creme 4 la bonne amie.)

Assurances of modern cookery books and of several people I know that a perfectly good Burnt Cream can be produced with the aid of an ordin- ary domestic gas or electric grill are made pre- sumably in good faith but perhaps without first- hand 'experience of the dish as it should be. Twice in recent months 1 have eaten it in restaurants. On neither occasion did it come within a ham- mer's throw of being the semi-liquid cream, calm, undisturbed and covered with the brittle caramel which together made up the potent charm of the dish as i remember it from my early youth in a household wherein dwelled a cook who must have been a dab hand with a salamander, for several of her party puddings were variations on Burnt Cream. Sometimes the caramel concealed an ice. once and most memorably, a frozen gooseberry fool.

My own experience of making creme brfilde by

burning the sugar under a gas or electric grill is that the former works well perhaps once out of tea tries and the latter once out of seven. Neither seems quite high enough a percentage for a dish so expensive and of which so much is expected. What happens is that either the sugar, subjected to too prolonged a beating, runs down into the cream, ruining it with toffeeish gobs, or else the caramel bl&ckens, turns to stickjaw, or is otherwise quite unlike Miss Jenkinson's 'light brown ice' and the `glass-plate' so graphically de- scribed by Elizabeth RaLlald in her Experienced English Housekeeper of 1769.

In restaurants a salamander is now a special and especially. fierce overhead grill used to pro- duce cabbalistic signs on the steamed sole or salmon for which you wait forty minutes when you order a grill. Examples of the obsolete iron salamander, round, long-handled and cumbrous, to be made red hot in the fire, can be seen in plenty of country museums and pictures of it are in dozen's of French and English nineteenth- century cookery books. Given a diagram and dimensions any blacksmith could produce a sala- mander. Some years ago Madame Cadec (27 Greek Street, WI) had a modern version made. These cost 18s. 6d., arc neat and easily handled but small, only three inches in diameter, which means that they are inconvenient for glazing or caramelising large surfaces but for Burnt Creams in one-portion soufild dishes they work splen- didly. Having made the instrument burning hot in the gas flame you clap it right down on the sugar crust and keep it there a minute or less, until the sizzling 'stops. After one or two tries the whole business' becomes extremely simple.