Taste by Kate Colquhoun

Author:Kate Colquhoun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2007-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

With or without its pièces montées, Regency Britain had not lost its sweet tooth, and the dessert course lost none of its appeal, though the elegant new French desserts were characterised less by billowing clouds of whipped cream than by small meringues poached in milk, sailing on a sea of crème anglaise. They were infused with perfumed essences and the subtle, bruised tastes of ingredients like chestnuts, vanilla, frangipane and neroli. Regency fancy was tempted as much by capillaire syrup (flavoured with dried maidenhair fern), chartreuse and brandies as by the taste of nougat, pistachio, maraschino, mint, aniseed and even – for the first time – caramel made from gently browned sugar and cream.

Beside tiny cups of steamed custard, delicately flavoured meringues and gently spiced fruits, desserts in the high style were layered into bombes or moulded into extraordinary shapes, titivated with ribbon and foliage decoration, iced friezes and glacé fruits. From the confectioner’s separate kitchenbt came little almond cakes known as pithiviers, rum babas, madeleines and the successful new charlottes, moulded with a lining of sponge fingers or buttered bread, filled with stacked apple or apricot slices, and inverted. ‘Nesselrode Pudding’, supposedly created by Carême, epitomised the character of the culinary era in which it was born. It was a complex mixture of chestnut purée whipped into an egg-and-cream custard, spiked with maraschino, perfumed with candied citron and vanilla, and either steamed or, in Carême’s case, frozen into the shape of a pineapple and garnished with stoned or sugared fruits.bu

There were flaky millefeuilles, delicate vol-au-vents and a whole new kind of sweet pastry, choux or pâte royale, made with a paste of boiling water, sugar, butter, flour and eggs, baked into little puffed-up balls to be filled with praline, almonds, fruits or creams or served with crème patissière, as delicate and as apparently slight as the sprigged-muslin dresses won by the ladies. Carême even attempted to modernise the English pouding, using a bowl rather than a cloth to produce a perfect dome enriched with chestnuts, rum and macaroons. Hard as he tried, one suspects that the heavy English pudding of tradition was not entirely successful in its high French incarnation, though ‘Pouding de cabinet’ was swiftly embraced, made from sliced brioche and dried fruits soaked in brandy, sugar, vanilla, candied peel and a cream custard, all steamed in a mould.

Since the foundation of the Royal Society of Horticulture in 1803, soft and exotic fruits had begun to pour from aristocratic greenhouses – pineapples, grapes, apricots and peaches, lemons and oranges, figs, currants and melons among them. The passion for ices was so insistent that in September 1804 Cassandra Austen wrote from Weymouth to her sister Jane, bitterly vexed by the lack of ice in the town. Smart confectioners like Guglielmino Jarrin coloured ices with burnt sugar, indigo and saffron or new commercial colourings like cochineal, carmine, vermillion, Prussian blue or Spanish green – adding real stems and leaves or the leafy fronds of maidenhair fern. Jarrin was the first

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