Home › Recipes › Farina Cake, with Quince Jelly
Farina Cake, with Quince Jelly
Make same as tapioca cake; an ounce less farina and no soaking needed.
A cross-reference entry of the kind trade manuals are full of: it assumes you have the tapioca cake formula in front of you and only notes where farina behaves differently. Everything useful here is in those two differences.
- You need the companion recipeOn its own this gives no quantities, pan, or oven. Find the tapioca cake entry in the same section and work from it, changing only the two things named here.
- What farina isFarina is finely milled hard wheat, coarser than flour and finer than semolina — the American breakfast cereal sold as Cream of Wheat is the same material. Instant or quick-cooking versions will thicken faster and set stiffer than the plain grain the book assumes.
- Why an ounce lessThe book does not say. The likely reason is that farina is a starch that gelatinises fully in the cooking liquid, while pearl tapioca holds part of its bulk as discrete beads, so weight for weight farina thickens harder and a little less is wanted.
- No soaking, and why it mattersPearl tapioca of the period was commonly soaked for hours in cold water before cooking. Farina hydrates in hot milk in a few minutes. Add it to the liquid in a thin stream with the whisk moving, or it will lump on contact and be difficult to smooth afterwards.
- Watch the pan bottomA milk-and-farina mixture scorches far more readily than tapioca. Use a heavy pan over moderate heat, or a double boiler, and stir into the corners.
- Oven languageThis entry names no oven. If the base recipe calls for a moderate oven, that is conventionally read as about 350F, slow about 300F, quick about 400-425F; these are approximations. A baked farina cake set with eggs is better at the low end and is done when the centre barely trembles.
- The quince jellyQuince is high in pectin and sets firm. The recipe says only that the cake is served with it; if you want it brushable, warm it gently with a spoonful of water. Commercial quince paste (membrillo) is a different, much stiffer product and is not a substitute.
- ServingExpect a set custard-pudding texture, not a sponge; how it is moulded and cut will depend on the tapioca cake entry it refers to.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of practical trade books Jessup Whitehead wrote for hotel and restaurant kitchens in Chicago in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and its style — terse, cross-referenced, priced by the ounce — is aimed at a working pastry man rather than a housekeeper. Starch puddings baked or moulded into sliceable "cakes" were the backbone of cheap hotel dessert service: farina, tapioca, sago, cornstarch and rice all took the same treatment with milk, sugar and eggs, and were commonly sent out with a preserve. Quince was a common choice because it jellied reliably without added pectin, and its sharpness cut the blandness of a milk pudding. That a whole recipe could be written as one sentence of amendment tells you how standardised the form had become.