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Pistachio Cream Cake
8 ounces of pistachio nuts, blanched and chopped. 8 ounces of sugar. 1/2 cupful of water. 2 ounces of butter. Whites of four eggs. Green juice from pounded spinach leaves for coloring. 3 jelly cake sheets of snow cake. Boil the sugar and water to thick syrup, throw in the butter, then the pistachio nuts, boil five minutes; then stir in the white of eggs and take it off when they thicken. Color it a little deeper than pistachio green. Spread this when cold between the three sheets of cake.
A boiled-sugar pistachio filling for a three-layer white cake, written for a professional shop where syrup stages were judged by eye. The whole thing hinges on how the egg whites go in.
- The hinge: the egg whitesThe whites are stirred raw into hot syrup and cooked only until they thicken. Work off the heat, add them in a thin stream while stirring hard, and return to very low heat if needed; dumped in at once over a burner they will curdle into sweet scrambled egg.
- "Thick syrup"An eye-judged stage, thicker than a thread but short of a hard ball; the recipe gives no test, so err on the softer side. Eight ounces of sugar is about a cup and an eighth by volume; half a cupful of water is plenty to dissolve it.
- Snow cakeA white cake raised with egg whites only, close-grained and pale, so the green filling reads against it. Any modern white layer cake baked in three thin sheets serves the same purpose; a standard butter cake will taste right but muddy the color.
- Jelly cake sheetsThin sheet layers baked in shallow jelly-cake pans rather than deep rounds, so that three of them plus filling make a modest, flat cake.
- Spinach greenSpinach leaves were pounded and the juice pressed out for coloring; it is weak, so a good handful gives only a tint, and the flavor is faint but not absent. The modern equivalent is a drop of green food coloring.
- Blanching the nutsPour boiling water over shelled pistachios, stand two minutes, drain and rub the skins off in a towel. Skipping this leaves brown flecks that dull the green considerably.
- Spread it coldThe filling stiffens as it cools and is unspreadable while hot and unmanageable if chilled hard. Let it come to room temperature, then work quickly before it sets further.
- YieldEnough filling for the three thin sheets the recipe calls for. Best eaten within a day or two, covered, at room temperature.
Pistachios reached American pastry kitchens as an expensive import, mostly from the eastern Mediterranean and Sicily, and through the nineteenth century their value in the trade was color as much as flavor: a natural green in a period when confectioners' other greens came from spinach juice, or from copper and arsenic compounds that periodically poisoned people. Spinach green, pressed from the pounded leaves, was the respectable choice. That the recipe calls for coloring "a little deeper than pistachio green" suggests the nuts' own color was not thought sufficient on its own; eight ounces of them was a real expense. The layered assembly on thin "jelly cake" sheets is a broadly American format, and one that became commoner as sheet tinware and more controllable ranges spread in the second half of the century.