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Petits Fours
To the beaten yolks of four eggs add one sugar and three tablespoons cold water. Sift one and one-half cup tablespoons cornstarch with one cup of flour, one and one-half teaspoons of baking powder and one-fourth teaspoon of salt, and add to first mixture. Beat well and add the stiffly beaten whites of the four eggs and whatever flavoring is desired. Bake for one-half hour in a moderate oven, using shallow pans. When cool, cut in small circles, split, scoop out a little of the crumb from the center of each and fill cavities with whipped cream or any prepared filling. Press together in pairs, dip in melted fondant (See chapter on Candies) decorate with nuts, glacé fruits, etc., and place each little cake in a paper case.
A cornstarch sponge cake baked flat, then cut, filled and enrobed in fondant. The text as printed is corrupt in two places, so read the quantities with care before you start.
- The garbled measurements"One sugar" is almost certainly one cup of sugar, and "one and one-half cup tablespoons cornstarch" is a compositor's error that cannot be resolved from the page; sponge formulas of this type vary widely in the proportion of cornstarch to flour. Pick a figure and treat it as a test bake rather than trusting the print.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F (period sources put "moderate" at about 350-375F). A shallow sponge this thin may well be done before the half hour given; check when the top springs back and the edges pull from the pan.
- Shallow pansA quarter-sheet or jelly-roll pan, parchment-lined. The batter should go no more than about 3/4 inch deep, since the whole point is a sheet you can cut into rounds and split horizontally.
- Folding the whitesThis is a foam cake with no fat and no liquid but the three tablespoons of water, so the beaten whites do much of the lifting alongside the baking powder. Fold them in by hand in three additions; beating them in collapses the cake.
- FlavoringTypically vanilla, lemon, almond or rose extract, a teaspoon at most. Add it with the yolk mixture rather than after the whites go in.
- Fondant for dippingPoured fondant, not the rolled kind sold today. It wants to be warmed only to about 100F and thinned with a little hot water or syrup — above roughly 110F it loses its gloss and dries dull and grainy.
- Cutting and yieldChill the sheet before cutting; a warm sponge tears. A quarter-sheet gives roughly 24-30 cakes with a 1 1/4-inch cutter, and the scraps are what you use to judge whether your cornstarch guess was right.
- Paper casesSmall fluted paper cups, sold now as petit four or bonbon cases. They matter more than they sound: fondant-dipped cakes stick to plates and the case is how they were served and stored.
Petits fours take their name from the French for "small ovens" — the cooling brick ovens of a professional pastry kitchen, whose falling heat was traditionally said to be used up on little cakes and dry biscuits after the day's bread and larger work was done. The distinction between petits fours secs (dry, biscuit-like) and petits fours glacés (filled and iced, as here) is a long-standing one in French practice, though when it hardened into a standard division is uncertain; this recipe is squarely the glacé kind. Its appearance in a Butterick book is characteristic of the period: the pattern company published domestic manuals aimed at ambitious middle-class households, and a fondant-dipped, paper-cased confection cross-referenced to a candy chapter was exactly the sort of thing a hostess was expected to manage without a pastry cook. The filing under "Doughnuts and Gingerbread" is less a statement about the dish than a sign of how loosely these volumes were organized — small cakes went wherever the chapter had room.