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Cakes and Pastry
Gâteau Napolitaine is a cake composed of thin round pieces of a paste of pounded almonds, flour, butter, yolks of eggs, etc., spread with preserve and piled one on the other. It may be garnished with pistachio nuts, or masked with the preserve, or glazed with sugar icing.
Served with cream, it is called Gâteau Napolitaine à la Chantilly. à la Compiègne is a light cake cut in slices, spread with apricot marmalade, and put together again. à la Victoria a cake with dried cherries, citron, etc.; served with almond custard. d'amandes a cake of ground almonds, eggs, sugar, etc. Baked in a shallow mould lined with paste, it is called Gâteau Saint-Charles. de pistaches is made in the same way with pistachio nuts instead of almonds.
Saint Louis a light cake of flour, butter, whites ENTREMETS. of eggs and pounded almonds, in a shell of paste; sprinkled with chopped almonds.
Gâteau de Moka is a coffee cake, served with cream. à la Monico is composed of layers of chocolate cake, and of a cake with almonds and cherries, spread with preserve, and the whole covered with chocolate icing and decorated with pink and white icing. de riz-rice cake. Served au caramel it has burnt sugar sauce. de riz à la bourgeoise-a rice cake baked in a mould lined with breadcrumbs; served with any fruit sauce. de semoule-semolina cake. Served with cream it is called à la crème.
Baba au rhum—a light cake made with yeast, with sultana raisins, citron, etc., baked in a mould decreasing in stages, and served with a sauce of apricot syrup and rum. It is sometimes called Baba à la Polonaise. À la Parisienne it is soaked with syrup, covered with a purée of apricots, and decorated with dried fruit; served with a compote of fruit and cream in the centre.
Brioches à la crème are light yeast cakes served with cream. If served with stewed fruit they are called Brioches aux fruits.
Savarin is another light cake made with yeast.
Aux fruits it is served with stewed fruit.
A glossary of cake names rather than a set of recipes: each line tells you what a cook would have to produce if the name went on the card. Nearly everything here is an assembly of separately made parts.
- Gâteau hereA gâteau on this page is usually a stack, not a sponge: thin rounds of almond paste baked separately, spread with preserve and piled up. The nearest modern thing is a layered torte or a mille-feuille, and nothing here is baked in one tin and iced.
- Reading the suffixesThe naming system is a base dish plus a qualifier, and the qualifier is the whole instruction. À la Chantilly means served with cream, aux fruits with stewed fruit, au caramel with burnt-sugar sauce. Learn six qualifiers and most of the chapter opens up.
- Citron and dried cherriesBoth are candied, not dried in the modern sense. Citron is the candied peel of a thick-skinned citrus and the cherries are glaçé. The dried cherries sold now are unsweetened and sour and will not behave like them.
- Pounded almondsWhere the page says pounded almonds or pistachios it means nuts worked to a paste in a mortar, oil and all. Ground almonds from a packet are drier; a processor run with a little of the sugar gets closer.
- The yeast cakesBaba au rhum, brioche and savarin are the one group here still made the same way, raised with yeast rather than baking powder, and still baked in the stepped and ring moulds the page describes.
- A word that is not a wordENTREMETS. sitting inside the sentence about Saint Louis cake is the running head printed above the page, swept down into the text. Read straight through it.
What the chapter shows is a dessert course built out of components: a paste of pounded almonds, a preserve, a custard, an icing, a compote, and then a name. The names are a map of where this cooking came from and who it was for — Napolitaine, de Moka, à la Compiègne, Saint-Charles, à la Victoria, à la Polonaise — places, saints and royalty used as labels, borrowed from the French restaurant kitchen and set down on an English dinner card. The practical consequence is a kitchen with hands in it. Almost every entry wants two or three preparations made separately and put together at the last moment, and the book treats that as unremarkable.