Food - Bee Wilson grapples with her blowtorch
Creme brulee is now ubiquitous. It is a pudding of manifold varieties, large and small, heart-shaped and oblong-shaped, chocolate-flavoured and wild thyme-scented, with rhubarb compote and fennel seeds, or without. Confused by this babel of seasonings, it is easy to forget that creme brulee really has only two basic forms, one English, one French. Both are delicious when done well. The pleasure you will get when cooking creme brulee at home depends on understanding which kind of cream you want to make and following your chosen course resolutely.
The first kind, once called "burnt cream", consists of a rich custard made on the stove-top, poured into a dish and chilled, then covered with a layer of sugar which is burnt to a glassy crust. A version of this kind of creme brulee can be traced back at least as far as Massialot's Le cuisinier royal et bourgeois of 1691. However, Massialot's custard mixture, flavoured with cinnamon and lemon peel, was made with milk. English cooks improved the recipe with cream. Various versions remain from the 18th century, usually perfumed with cinnamon, and sometimes orange flower water, too. But burnt cream "now disappears from the cookery books for nearly a century", as Elizabeth David describes in an essay on the subject in Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (Michael Joseph, £20). It turned up again in 1879, in the kitchens of Trinity College, Cambridge, but in a simpler form. No flavourings or embellishment now, just thick cream, egg yolks and sugar. The custard itself was unsugared. In her recipe for "Cambridge Burnt Cream", Elizabeth Ayrton remarks: "On no account add sugar to this cream - the whole point of the traditional dish is that the cream in unsweetened." Its beauty lies in the contrast between the unadulterated cream underneath and the thick dark sugar on top, the kind you tap at with your spoon.
In the second kind of creme brulee, on the other hand, the sugar crust must be very thin and fragile, almost merging with the custard. The Naked Chef rages against "horrible" thick crusts on creme brulee, but does not explain that his own recipe for creme brulee is more in the French tradition than the English. This second, more delicate kind is made from a mixture of milk (often UHT), cream, sugar and egg yolks, baked in a very low oven. On French menus, these are sometimes called "cassonades" (the French, oddly, have no word for custard). In this case, the sugar glaze is really the icing on the cake; such creams, wobbly and mellow, taste wonderful even without the caramel.
This Frenchified kind lends itself to individual serving dishes and also takes flavouring better, whether vanilla, coffee or more outre herbs. One reason French chefs flavour their "cassonades" is that French cream can't compare with ours. The worst cremes brulees are those made by British cooks who mangle up the two traditions, covering an insubstantial "cassonade" custard with a hefty ceiling of toffee, or adding strange fruits and spices to what ought to be a plain burnt cream.
Each kind of creme brulee poses its own difficulties. The first kind requires a lot of stirring and the moral fibre to keep it over the flame until it is thick enough. The second kind, ostensibly easier, takes ages to set in the oven, but if you make the mistake of turning the temperature up, the yolks may solidify into scrambled egg. The real nightmare, though, is the sugar crust. Elizabeth David, using a gas grill, claimed a success rate of "once out of ten tries". In the old days, the cream was branded and burnished with a salamander - or, as Massialot put it, a "fire-shovel heated red-hot, to give it a fine gold-colour". The modern solution is a blowtorch, although this is a rather annoying implement, inclined to burn almost anything (fingers, eyebrows, curtains) before it burns the sugar. You should also know that it is much easier to achieve a perfect crust on the first kind of creme brulee because of the greater amount of sugar.
So, to make the first kind, you need 600ml double cream and eight well-beaten egg yolks. Boil the cream for one minute before pouring it, stirring constantly, on the well-beaten yolks. Stir in a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water until well thickened, pour into a serving dish, cool and chill. If you prefer the second style, whisk eight egg yolks with 80g caster sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla essence. Bring 300ml double cream and 200ml milk to the boil, pour over the yolks, and put in either six ramekins or one large dish, placed in a bain-marie in a low oven (140oC) for 35-45 minutes (ramekins) or 1-11/2 hours (large dish). Cool and chill. Then sprinkle your cream with demerara, thickly for the first kind, thinly for the second kind, and melt the sugar with a blowtorch or, if you want to chance it, under a hot grill.
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