Creme Patisserie- Makes Everything Fabulous

This is worth learning- not difficult, the most rewarding building block of the pastry world, and delicious on its own.. It is simply a pudding, enriched with egg yolks and finished with butter. If quality had a flavor, this would be it- you can taste everything- creamy, rich, subtle. You will be unable to use packaged substitutes after trying this; it is so simple you will not need to.

We will need:

450 ml/ 2 C whole fresh milk

4 egg yolks

50 g/ 4 T corn starch

130 g/ 2/3 C sugar

pinch salt

vanilla, or better still a plumped bean to steep in the milk

50 g/ 4 tablespoons butter

Heat the milk to simmering in a heavy-bottomed pan, with the vanilla bean if you are using one. Beat the yolks, add the sugar slowly and carefully as you beat, and then the cornstarch and salt. Very slowly spoon warm milk into the yolk mixture, whisking as you do, to bring it slowly up totemperature. When you have added half of the milk ad the mixture is quite hot, you can add it all back into  the pan with the warm (not boiling) milk. Continue to whisk over medium heat- making sure the whisk makes contact with the bottom of the pan all over, until it thickens, which will happen all at once at the end. Keep whisking and let it nearly boil another minute. Remove from the heat, and genty whisk in the butter in small pieces, one at a time. Squeeze the seeds from the vanilla bean into the cream if you are using one, or add a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Pour through a fine-mesh strainer into a bowl (even with the most careful whisking) into a dish and cover with a round of non-stick parchment. Cool, then chill, then use as you like for instance in a creme chibouste to fill a meringue.

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Marble Eggs for your Easter Table

How did these first come to be? Like so many things we enjoy, it must be thanks to the innovation of an inspired homemaker very, very long ago. With all the pre-festivity preparations going on, there are always a lot of onions around, and before commercial blood-red* dyes became available, onion skins were used to tint eggs for Easter. They have an astonishing amount of pigment in them- they look flimsy and blond, but they give a deep bronzy hue to the water. Leaves and petals (happy reminders of our season of rebirth) are often affixed to the outside of eggs before dyeing to leave their silhouette. From there, it was a probably easy jump to use not just the pigment from the onion skins, but their beautiful veins and patterns as well. A happy transformation takes place, as the vegetal patterns give the egg a mineral quality- they truly do look like marble.

As the onion skins dye the eggs an orang-ish hue- very much like that of brown eggs, it's useful to start with white eggs from the outset to get as many variations of color as possible. Save the skins from several onions- no matter if some are in small pieces:

Then wrap pieces around the egg- a damp egg grabs them better. Overlapping and gaps both make the patterns more complex.

Now take a clean nylon stocking (cut off one whole leg so it is easier to work with), thread your hand in to the toe, and grasp the egg through the stocking, pulling he stocking up and around the egg, and keeping the onion skins firmly in place. 

Tie a knot to make as tight of a little package as you can

Place another onion skin-wrapped egg right over the knot, tie it snugly, and continue on, until you have a knotted rope of wrapped and tightly secured eggs:

Cover them with water, and add a couple of shots of vinegar (to strengthen the pigment? to keep the eggs from cracking? I hear both. The smell of boiling vinegar always makes me think of Easter.) White shelled eggs can be fragile- the nylon helps protect them, but best to boil them slowly all the same- at medium, barely bubbling, for at least twenty minutes, maybe a half hour. They'll be well boiled and hard, but we are going for a beautiful exterior, rather than a delicate, creamy yolk.

The water now will be a deep bronze. Using blue dye strengthens the contrast. Add a packet of dark blue egg dye to the water and leave it for another twenty minutes- you can pull the strand out to check he color through the nylon stocking. the uncovered white parts of the shell will take in the blue, while the boiled onion skins will seal the other portions of the shell. We now have an ungainly looking messy and dark rope of eggs- rinse the rope, and put it in a plate. Now they are ready to be cut out of the nylons with a pair of scissors:

Peel the onion skins away to reveal the richly patterned eggs- each is lovelier than the last. They do look quite dry- liven the surface by buffing with a paper napkin soaked with a few drops of oil:

The egg on the left has a glossy sheen from the oil,
but, well-buffed, is not at all sticky to the touch.

*The blood-red egg is iconic of Orthodox Easter. Eggs are dyed red on Holy Thursday, in honor of the Crucifixion. On Easter, as the light of the resurrection is passed from candle to candle, the blood red shell is peeled away to reveal the white egg (life everlasting?). Curiously a competitive element was introduced somewhere along the way- everyone seeks out the hardest egg in order for it to remain intact as it crushes the shells of the others when they are tapped together.

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