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Farina Cake, with Fruit, Rum Sauce
Raisins, currants and citron baked in the farina cake. Served with thick syrup containing rum. Small timbales on the same plan.
This is shorthand of the kind pastry-shop manuals used constantly: a variation written for a cook who already has the plain farina cake formula in hand. To make it you need that base recipe, and a few of the terms need translating.
- FarinaIn American pastry books of this period farina means semolina or a fine wheat cereal of the Cream of Wheat type, not plain flour. It is cooked in milk to a thick paste, then enriched with butter, sugar and eggs, which is what allows the mixture to be called a cake at all.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Plump them briefly in warm water or rum and dry them before use, or they will pull moisture from the batter.
- CitronCandied citron peel. Cut it small, about the size of the currants, so it does not sink or bake into hard nuggets.
- Fruit that stays suspendedA cooked farina batter is heavy but slack. Toss the fruit with a spoonful of the dry sugar or flour from the recipe and fold it in last, off the heat, or it will settle to the bottom of the mold.
- Thick syrup with rumBoil sugar and water, roughly two parts sugar to one water, until it coats a spoon, then take it off the heat before adding the rum. Rum boiled into syrup loses most of its point; the alcohol is the flavor here.
- TimbalesSmall straight-sided molds. Butter and sugar them, fill about three-quarters full and bake gently until just set at the center; a moderate oven and a water bath suit a custard-like farina batter. A large cake will want considerably longer than the small molds. The book gives no temperatures or times, so any figures are a modern cook's estimate.
Farina cakes and puddings sit at the point where German and Austrian confectionery met the American hotel kitchen. Cooked semolina thickened with milk, eggs and butter is the base of Griesskuchen and Griesspudding, and German-trained pastry cooks were among those who carried the method into large restaurant and hotel bakeshops. Raisins, currants and citron were a common fruiting combination in nineteenth-century pastry work. The book's terseness is itself informative: an entry like this one reads as a prompt for a cook who already knew the base formula and needed only to be told what to add and what to pour over it, and the closing line about small timbales indicates that one batter could be presented in two forms.