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FRUIT, COMPOTE OF (a la Genoese)
This is a good mode of serving fruit in a case of Genoese pastry. Take a Genoese cake (see GENOESE CAKE), cut off the bottom, and hollow out the interior by means of a cutter; or the cake may be cut in slices. Various fruits may be used, the idea being to make the outside ornamental, and to see that the colours contrast well with the fruits. Mask the cake over with glace icing, or whipped cream, and sprinkle it with green and mauve sugar. Either of these colours alone might be used, or yellow might be added for a third. The case should be set in a cold place, and filled with fruit just before being sent to the table. The fruit is preferably iced, whatever the kind. It should show well above the top of the case, and may be ornamented with cream in spots of colour to match the sides. Probable cost, 4s.
This is an assembly instruction rather than a formula: a hollowed sponge case, iced and sanded with coloured sugar, filled with cold fruit at the last moment. Nearly everything hinges on the fruit going in dry and late.
- Fill at the table, not beforeFill at the last moment -- the recipe says the case is "filled with fruit just before being sent to the table." Syrup or fruit juice will soften the sponge and slump the icing. Ice the case and chill it, drain the fruit thoroughly on a rack or cloth, and combine only as it goes out.
- "Iced" means chilled"Iced" here most likely means chilled -- fruit held on ice until very cold rather than frozen, though period usage of the word covers both and the recipe does not specify. Frozen fruit would weep as it thawed and defeat the construction.
- CompoteA compote is fruit poached in sugar syrup and cooled in it, simmered only until the fruit is tender. Firm fruit such as pears, apricots and plums holds its shape; berries are better used raw and cold.
- Genoese cakeThe cross-reference is to a whole-egg sponge beaten warm with sugar, then folded with flour and melted butter \ a firm, close-grained cake that cuts cleanly and stands up as a case. An ordinary airy foam sponge will tear when you hollow it.
- MaskTo mask is to coat the outside smoothly and opaquely. Glace icing here is icing sugar slaked with a little water or syrup to a thick pouring consistency, applied to the cold cake.
- Coloured sugarsGreen and mauve sugar are made by rubbing a drop or two of colouring through granulated sugar with the fingers and drying it. Modern gel colours work; Victorian confectioners' colours were not always food-safe, which is one reason such preparations were regulated later.
- Yield and costCost -- The stated 4s. is a considerable sum for a dessert at the time of writing; this was a dinner-party centrepiece, not a family pudding.
By the end of the nineteenth century the fashionable sweet course was judged largely on how it looked when carried in. Genoese is the firm whole-egg sponge that French patisserie adopted as its all-purpose structural cake, and hollowing a baked case to hold something cold belongs to the same tradition as the croustade and the timbale -- edible architecture inherited from the early nineteenth-century grande cuisine of Careme and his imitators. The insistence on contrasting colours, coloured sugars and matching spots of cream reflects a period in which cheap dyes had made tinted sugar widely available and household confectionery briefly very bright. "A la Genoese" here signals only the pastry used, not any connection to the cooking of Genoa.