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Glove Cakes
Beat the yolks of five eggs; mix them with sufficient flour to make a smooth, firm paste; add three table-spoonfuls of finely-sifted sugar, three table-spoonfuls of thick cream, and some cardamoms. Roll out the pastry, cut it into fanciful shapes, and fry in hot butter, to which has been added a spoonful or two of water. Time, five or six minutes to fry. Probable cost, 8d. for this quantity.
A rich fried pastry rather than a cake in the modern sense: egg-yolk dough, cardamom, and a brief turn in hot fat. Two things in the original need attention — the unmeasured flour and the frying time.
- Flour is unmeasured"Sufficient flour to make a smooth, firm paste" is the only guide, and it is genuinely open. With five yolks and three tablespoons of cream, expect somewhere around 1 1/2 to 2 cups; add it gradually and stop when the dough is firm enough to roll thin without sticking.
- Yolks onlyNo whites go in. Five yolks give a dough that is short and yellow and tears easily rather than stretching, so roll it between 1/8 and 1/16 inch and handle the cut shapes gently.
- CardamomsThe original means the seeds from green cardamom pods, crushed fine. A scant teaspoon of freshly ground seed is plenty for this quantity; pre-ground cardamom sold in jars is markedly weaker and staler, so use a little more if that is what is to hand.
- The butter and waterThe spoonful or two of water added to the frying butter is usually explained as a way of stopping the milk solids catching before the pastry cooked, though the book gives no reason. Clarified butter or ghee does the same job with far less spitting.
- Frying timeFive or six minutes will darken a thin pastry well past pleasant. At 350F these need roughly 45 to 90 seconds a side, turning once, until pale gold and puffed at the cut edges. The stated time would suit shapes rolled considerably thicker.
- Sugar placementThe three tablespoons of sifted sugar go into the dough, which keeps these only lightly sweet. A dusting of more sifted sugar over the hot cakes is conventional for pastries of this family and improves them.
- Yield and servingExpect roughly 30 to 40 small shapes. They are best within a few hours of frying; once cold they keep a week in a tin but lose their crispness, and they do not reheat well.
- Probable cost8d. is eightpence in pre-decimal currency, a modest outlay for this quantity in the later nineteenth century, for a pastry built on yolks, flour and a spoonful of cream.
"Glove cakes" belongs to a very large European family of fried egg-yolk pastries cut into fanciful shapes — knots, lozenges, twists, slipped loops — of which the Scandinavian fattigmann and klejner, the German Hasenohren, and the Polish chrusciki are the best-known survivors. The combination here of yolks, thick cream, cardamom and a quick fry in butter resembles the Norwegian version, though the book prints the recipe without any note of where it came from. The name may describe the shape rather than an ingredient: dough cut and slit so the fried strips splay like fingers. Such pastries were festival food in many places, using up yolks left over from other baking and costing little beyond fat and flour.