Crême Patissière, or Pastry Cream

Instructions

1. To one ounce of fine flour add, very gradually, the beaten yolks of three fresh eggs.
2. Stir to them briskly, and in small portions at first, three-quarters of a pint of boiling cream, or of cream and new milk mixed.
3. Then turn the whole into a clean stewpan, and stir it over a very gentle fire until it is quite thick; take it off, and stir it well up and round.
4. Replace it over the fire, and let it just simmer from six to eight minutes.
5. Pour it into a basin, and add to it immediately a couple of ounces of pounded sugar, one and a half of fresh butter, cut small, or clarified, and a spoonful of the store mixture of page 153, or a little sugar which has been rubbed on the rind of a lemon.
6. The cream is rich enough for common use without further addition; but an ounce and a half of ratifias, crushed almost to powder with a paste-roller, improves it much, and they should be mixed with it for the receipt which follows.
7. Proportions: Flour, 1 oz.; yolks of eggs, 3; boiling cream, or milk and cream mixed, 3/4 pint: just simmered, 6 to 8 minutes. Butter, 1-1/2 oz.; sugar, 2 oz.; little store-flavouring, or rasped lemon-rind; ratifias, 1-1/2 oz.
8. Note: this is an excellent preparation, which may be used for tartlets, cannelons, and other forms of pastry, with extremely good effect.