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Genoese Pastry
7/8 cup Gold Medal flour 6 tablespoons butter 1/2 cup almond paste 1/2 cup sugar 5 eggs Melt butter in a bowl, taking care it does not get too hot; break the eggs into another bowl, add the sugar. Stand the bowl in a saucepan of boiling water and whip the mixture for twenty minutes; do not let it get too hot. Take the bowl from the water, add the almond paste crumbled fine, beat until smooth and add the butter and, last of all, sift in the flour, stirring lightly all the time. Line a round jelly cake pan with buttered paper, neatly fitted and standing an inch above the edge. Bake in a rather quick oven for half an hour. When it is done no marks should remain on it when pressed with the finger.
This is a génoise enriched with almond paste — a foam cake that rises on whipped whole eggs alone, with no chemical leavening. Everything depends on how much air you beat into the eggs and how little of it you lose afterward.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe melted butter and the sifted flour are the two things that will collapse the foam. Add the butter in a thin stream down the side of the bowl and fold with a spatula in as few strokes as will incorporate it; sift the flour over the surface in two or three additions and cut through rather than beat. "Stirring lightly all the time" is the whole instruction.
- Twenty minutes of whippingThat figure assumes a hand whisk. Warm the eggs and sugar over the water bath only until the mixture reaches about 110F and the sugar has dissolved, then take it off and whip with a mixer for 5 to 8 minutes, until it triples and a ribbon falling from the beater holds its line for a few seconds. Overheating scrambles the egg at the bowl's edge, which is why the original repeats the warning.
- "A rather quick oven"The book gives no temperature. Modern equivalents for a quick oven usually fall somewhere around 400-425F, so "rather quick" points to the lower end of that. For a full half hour with a thin cake of this size, 375F is safer — check at 22 minutes.
- Flour and eggs by weight7/8 cup of flour is roughly 4 oz, 110g. Eggs of this period may have run smaller than today's large; five large eggs (about 250g out of shell) works, and four extra-large gives a little less.
- Almond paste, not marzipanAlmond paste is roughly equal parts ground almonds and sugar and is meant for baking; marzipan carries far more sugar and will make the crumb heavy and sweet. Crumble it fine as directed, or work it smooth with a spoonful of the egg foam before folding it in, or you will get lumps that never disperse.
- The panA "round jelly cake pan" is a shallow straight-sided tin, 8 or 9 inches across and an inch or two deep. Line the base with parchment and let a parchment collar stand an inch proud of the rim as instructed — the batter climbs as it sets.
- Butter temperatureMelted butter that has cooled to barely warm folds in; hot butter deflates the foam and can cook streaks of egg. Melt it first and let it stand while the eggs whip.
- Yield and servingOne 9-inch layer, 8 to 10 slices. Génoise is dry by design — it is built to be split, brushed with syrup or liqueur, and filled or iced rather than eaten plain.
Génoise takes its name from Genoa, and is traditionally credited to Genoese pastry cooks working in France, though the attribution is old and loose rather than documented. What distinguishes it from a sponge cake proper is that whole eggs are whipped together, warmed over water to help them take air, and then enriched with melted butter — a method that yields a firm, close crumb strong enough to be split, soaked and layered. That structural quality is why it became the backbone of European gâteaux, and why the addition of almond paste here is so characteristic of nineteenth-century pastry work. Its appearance in a flour-milling company's cookbook is worth noting: a cake leavened by nothing but eggs and technique was an ambitious thing to set before the home baker.</p>