A soufflé with the stress removed

C rème pat" we call it and it is, or used to be, the bricks and mortar - or mortar at any rate - of the pastry cook's art. It is the patissier's equivalent of Louis de Béchamel's white sauce, once ubiquitous but now considered very vieux chapeau .

Crème patissière , to give it its proper name, or pastry cream, or confectioner's custard, is that rich sweet gunk that used to be in every pastry shop window. The traditional millefeuille , with its zig-zag pattern in fondant on top, oozed with rich yellow pastry cream and, in a sugar-deprived diet, tasted unctuous and sweet. The fact that crème pat no longer seems so prevalent is not because technology has passed it by so much as we simply don't need it. Cream is comparatively cheap and plentiful these days. Pastry cooks used to be the most parsimonious of cooks, mainly because their margins were so meagre. At the end of every pastry cook's day, all the flour used for dusting pastry and doughs and left lying on the marble benches used to be swept up and sieved back into the store bin to be used the next day. Waste is anathema to the pastry cook. Cream was an absolute luxury and an unreliable, perishable luxury at that. The fresh cream pastries used to be kept in a separate, refrigerated counter and sold at a premium, should one be lucky enough to live in a cream-rich area. Otherwise it was crème pat .

There would be no point mourning the passing of pastry cream if it did not have other, more transcendent uses. Soufflés, in short. Pedants will argue that an appareil à soufflé is different from crème pat , but it isn't, while faddists will contend that soufflés are a thing of the past and that too is erroneous - or I very much hope it is. For all the jellies, foams and smears of modern cooking, a soufflé still gives more pleasure, both by its appearance, its fragility and its sheer lightness than almost any other dish. People get nervous making soufflés. The recipe that follows is a soufflé in disguise, with the stress removed. Apart from the fact that it never fails, it would be little noticed if it did. I first had it in a hotel in Brittany many years ago: it transported me then and will, I hope, do the same for you.

This recipe makes rather large quantities of pastry cream but it would be difficult to make less of it. Either make the gratin many times over or use the pastry cream as a filling for cakes and pastries, or as the base for a trifle.

The eau de vie is tricky to get hold of: do not get the framboise liqueur - it is heavy and rather sickly - but substitute with Grand Marnier or some other orange-based liqueur. This gratin is a seductive dish and therefore ideal for two. Besides which, you can only get two plates under most grills that I know.

RECIPE

Raspberry gratin

Ingredients

1 vanilla pod

500ml milk

6 egg yolks

150g caster sugar

75g flour

Icing sugar, for sprinkling

Framboise eau de vie

Squeeze of lemon

8 egg whites

2 small punnets of raspberries

Method

Split the vanilla pod and put it in a saucepan with the milk and bring gently to the boil. Whisk the egg yolks with half the sugar very well until they pale and increase a little in volume. Add the flour and mix to a smooth paste. Pour the boiling milk on to this mixture, whisk it well and return to the heat. Bring this gently back to the boil, stirring constantly, and make sure that none catches on the sides or corners of the pan. Turn down the heat and continue stirring for three to four minutes. You should now have a thick, rich and lump-free custard. Pour into a bowl, sprinkle with icing sugar and then cover the surface with cling film (unless you have that strange but not unusual prediliction for custard skin) and cool.

Place four tablespoons of the mixture in a bowl and add a measure of the eau de vie. Whisk these together well to make a smooth paste. Put the egg whites in the bowl of an electric mixer (or a large mixing bowl if whisking by hand) and add a tiny pinch of salt and a small squeeze of lemon. Whisk the egg whites, adding a little of the remaining sugar at a time: when you have whisked the whites to stiff peaks you should have used half and should then fold in the remaining sugar and end up with a glossy meringue. Spoon a small amount of this into the custard mixture and whisk together to a smooth cream. Add all the rest of the meringue at once and carefully fold the two together with a spatula, blending it in to a smooth mixture without knocking out too much air.

Spoon the mixture on to two large plates and smooth over with the spatula. Push the raspberries head side up in to the mixture until it is evenly dotted with the fruit and it is all used up. Put the plates under a hot grill and wait until the gratins puff up around the raspberries and brown nicely. The mixture should not move when you give the plate a little shake. Devour immediately.