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Gateau Russe
Beat eight eggs well together (yolks and whites) for twenty minutes, add eight ounces of sifted sugar, stirring all the time, a tea-spoonful of baking-powder, and eight ounces of flour. Pour into shallow tins greased and papered, and bake for five minutes. Turn out on paper with sifted sugar. When cold, cut the cake into rounds of whatever size required, put one on top of the other, with a layer of apricot jam between each round. Cut the centres out of the three top rounds. Decorate the sides with a trellis of sugar-icing, fill the centre with whipped cream, and border with green preserved fruit cut into patterns of stars, diamonds, and triangles.
A thin, fatless sponge baked in sheets, then stacked with jam and finished as a ring filled with cream. The whole thing stands or falls on the aeration of the eggs, since there is no butter and almost no leavening to fall back on.
- The hinge: whole-egg foamTwenty minutes of beating by hand corresponds to roughly 8-10 minutes in a stand mixer on high, or longer if the eggs are cold. Beat until the mixture triples and a drizzle from the whisk sits on the surface for several seconds before sinking; warming the bowl of eggs and sugar over hot water first gets you there faster and more reliably.
- Fold, do not stirThe instruction to add flour "stirring all the time" reflects hand-beating rhythm, not vigorous mixing. Sift the flour over the foam in three additions and fold with a spatula until no streaks remain. Overworking here is the usual cause of a dense, leathery sheet.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A five-minute bake implies a hot oven, in the region of 425-450F, with the batter spread thin -- roughly a quarter of an inch. The sponge is done when it springs back and the edges just begin to shrink from the tin.
- Weights in cupsEight ounces of sifted sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of granulated; eight ounces of flour is about 1 3/4 cups scooped, or nearer 2 cups if measured after sifting. Weighing is worth it here, as the ratio of egg to flour is the entire structure.
- "Greased and papered"Parchment does the job of the greased paper. Grease the tin, line it, and grease the paper too; a fatless sponge this thin tears easily.
- Turning out on sugared paperThe sugar keeps the hot sponge from sticking and from steaming itself soggy. Invert it while hot, peel the baking paper away immediately, and let it cool flat rather than rolled.
- Green preserved fruitMost likely candied angelica, a common green garnish of the period and still sold by cake-decorating suppliers, though other green candied fruit or peel would answer. Candied citron peel tinted green, or thin slices of glace kiwi, can stand in.
- Assembly and yieldAssembly -- Cut the rings for the top three layers with a smaller cutter before stacking, and fill the well with whipped cream only shortly before serving, as the sponge absorbs moisture quickly.
Nineteenth-century pastry cooks attached the label a la russe to a great many dishes, usually to signal fashion rather than any documented Russian origin, and this stacked, jam-layered sponge with a cream-filled well belongs to that habit; the same construction turns up elsewhere as a gateau or charlotte ring. What is genuinely of its moment is the technique: a whole-egg sponge with no butter, raised almost entirely by twenty minutes of arm work, with the teaspoon of baking powder acting as insurance. Chemical leaveners had become reliable and cheap by the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled, and they appear quietly inside an otherwise classical batter. The trellis of icing, the geometric cut fruit and the tiered ring reflect the period's taste for architectural dessert work, where a cake was expected to be looked at from across a table before anyone cut it.