Cornucopias
(Boston Cooking School Magazine) 3 egg whites 1/3 cup sugar 2 egg yolks 1/3 cup flour 1/8 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon vanilla Add the salt to the whites of the eggs, and beat them till stiff and dry. Beat in the sugar, adding it a little at a time. Beat the yolks of the eggs till thick and lemon colored, and stir them and the flavoring into the whites. Then carefully fold in the flour.
Oil a baking pan and sprinkle it with flour. Spread the batter on the pan in round cakes about four and one-half inches across and one-fourth inch thick, leaving room enough between the cakes so that they will not touch one another in baking. As soon as they are taken from the oven, run a pancake turner under them to take them from the pan. Roll each in the shape of a cornucopia, and stick a tooth-pick into it to hold it in shape till it cools. When cold, take out the toothpick and fill with whipped cream.
A thin sponge batter baked as flat rounds and rolled while still hot. The whole recipe hinges on speed at the oven door: once the rounds cool they snap instead of curling.
- No oven temperature givenBake at 375F. Thin sponge rounds this size need only 5 to 7 minutes, until the surface is set and the edges are just coloring; a darker bake makes them brittle and unrollable.
- Work one sheet at a timeRolling has to happen while the rounds are still hot from the oven, a matter of seconds rather than minutes. Bake three or four rounds per sheet at most, and keep the next sheet in the refrigerator while the first bakes.
- Pan preparation"Oil a baking pan and sprinkle it with flour" means a neutral oil or melted butter brushed thin, then dusted. Parchment is easier and lifts the rounds cleanly, though the undersides brown slightly less.
- Shaping without a moldA toothpick will hold the seam, but a metal cream-horn cone or a cone of foil is steadier. Let the shell cool fully on the cone before sliding it off.
- Folding the flourSift the flour over the surface in two additions and fold with a spatula. Any streak of unincorporated flour becomes a hard spot that resists rolling.
- YieldRoughly six to ten shells about four and a half inches across, depending on how thinly they are spread. Reckon two per person as a dessert.
- Filling and timingFill only at the moment of serving, as whipped cream soon softens the shells. Unsweetened or barely sweetened cream suits them best; a tablespoon of sugar per cup of cream at most.
- StorageUnfilled shells keep two or three days in an airtight tin. In humid weather they go leathery within hours, so a low oven for a few minutes will crisp them again.
Cornucopias were a familiar item in the American cooking-school repertoire around 1900, a thin sponge batter spread flat and rolled hot to give something of the look of pastry-shop work. The Boston Cooking School Magazine, credited here, began publication in the 1890s and carried the school's plain, measured style into home kitchens; recipes from its pages turn up in household compilations for decades afterward. The name is from the Latin cornu copiae, horn of plenty, a shape borrowed from ornament and table decoration of the period.