Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Chantilly Cake
Chantilly Cake
Stand one basin in another the larger one containing hot water, and break in five eggs, put in a teacupful of caster-sugar, and whisk for about ten minutes, then remove the basin from the hot water, and whisk for a few moments longer; sift in half a dozen tablespoonfuls of flour, stirring till quite smooth. Butter the inside of a cylinder-mould, sprinkle caster-sugar over it and pour in the cake mixture, and if it fills the mould, tie on a strip of buttered paper around it so as to come about an inch and a half above the top of the mould, then bake in a moderate oven. Whip up half a pint of rich cream with a little caster-sugar till it is quite firm, when it may be flavored to taste. Turn out the cake when cooked, fill the hollow with cream, and serve.
This is a genoise — a whole-egg sponge raised by nothing but air beaten into warm eggs — baked in a ring and filled with sweetened whipped cream. The hinge is the folding: once the flour goes in, every stroke costs you volume.
- Fold, do not stirThe instruction to stir "till quite smooth" predates the modern understanding of what deflates a foam. Sift the flour over the surface in two or three additions and cut it in with a spatula, stopping the moment no dry streaks remain. A batter beaten smooth here bakes into a flat, rubbery ring.
- The warm-whisk methodThe basin over hot water brings the eggs and sugar to roughly blood heat, which lets them take up far more air. Whisk until the mixture is pale and falls from the beater in a ribbon that sits on the surface for a few seconds — about ten minutes by hand, three to four with an electric mixer, then a minute or two off the heat to cool and stabilise it.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar, sold as such in the US. Granulated sugar buzzed briefly in a food processor is a fair substitute; it dissolves quickly in the warm eggs, which matters for the foam.
- A teacupfulNot a standard measure even in 1896; a teacup could be reckoned at anywhere from about four to eight fluid ounces. For five eggs, 5 to 6 oz of sugar (about 3/4 cup) balances the batter; more than that and the sponge turns heavy and sticky.
- Six tablespoonfuls of flourLevel, that is only about 3/8 cup, some 1 3/4 oz; heaped, as period tablespoonfuls often were, it could approach 3 oz. Either way a light ratio typical of genoise. Weigh it if you can, and sift twice.
- Cylinder-mouldA plain tube or ring pan, not a fluted Bundt — the fluting makes the cake hard to release and leaves no clean hollow for the cream. Butter and sugar it as directed; the sugar coating gives the sponge something to climb and a fine crisp crust.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F. A 9-inch tube pan takes 25 to 35 minutes; the cake is done when it springs back at the centre and the sides have just begun to shrink from the pan. The buttered paper collar, as the recipe says, is only needed if the mixture fills the mould.
- Half a pint of creamIn Oscar's American kitchen that is one US cup, which whips to about two cups — enough to fill the ring and no more. Whip to firm peaks only; carried further it turns grainy, and it will stiffen again in the refrigerator.
- Flavoring and serving"Flavored to taste" at this date might have meant vanilla, kirsch, or maraschino. Fill the cake no more than an hour before serving, as the cream weeps and the sponge softens. Serves eight.
Crème Chantilly — cream whipped with sugar — is named for the Château de Chantilly north of Paris, and is often credited to its seventeenth-century maître d'hôtel François Vatel, though that attribution is traditional rather than documented; sweetened whipped cream appears in French and English cookery well before the name attached to it. By the 1890s "Chantilly" on a menu simply signalled whipped cream, and a Chantilly cake meant a hollow sponge filled with it at the last moment. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms rather than its stoves, collected this among the hotel's standard sweets: a dessert that depends entirely on technique and costs almost nothing in ingredients, which is exactly the sort of thing a large hotel kitchen turns out well and a home cook of the period was expected to attempt with a hand whisk and a basin of hot water.