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Conde Cakes
Roll out to eight turns about half a pound of puff-paste. Cut into strips four inches wide and mask the top with almond paste; cut the strips again into oblongs one and a half inches wide and sprinkle over the top with a little sugar, flavored with vanilla. Lay them on baking-sheets a short distance apart and bake in a slack oven. When they are cooked, trim around the edges, and serve.
A short entry that assumes a professional pastry section: puff paste already made, almond paste already softened to spreading consistency, and a cook who knows what a slack oven does. Three things need translating.
- "Eight turns"A turn is one roll-and-fold. Eight is more than the six that many modern recipes call for, which should give thinner layers and a less dramatic lift; that may well be the point here, since the strips need to stay flat enough to carry the topping. Rest the dough 20-30 minutes in the refrigerator between every pair of turns.
- Half a pound of pasteAbout 225 g, which rolled to roughly 1/8 inch gives two or three strips four inches wide and a yield of roughly 12 to 18 fingers, depending on the length of your sheet.
- "Mask" the almond pasteMask means spread in a thin, even coat over the whole surface, not dot or pipe. Commercial almond paste from a tube is too stiff; slacken it with a little egg white until it spreads like thick icing. Traditionally this topping is closer to an almond royal icing: ground almonds, icing sugar and egg white beaten smooth.
- Cut in the right orderSpread the almond first, then cut across into 1 1/2-inch oblongs, as the recipe directs. It returns to trim the edges after baking, though it does not say why.
- "A slack oven"Conventionally reckoned at around 250-300F. The low heat keeps the almond topping from scorching before the pastry underneath is cooked through. Timing will depend on how thin you have rolled the paste; judge by the pastry being dry and crisp in the layers rather than by colour alone.
- Vanilla sugarGranulated sugar left a week in a sealed jar with a split vanilla pod. A modern shortcut is to rub a scraped pod's seeds into caster sugar; the recipe wants a dry flavoured sugar sprinkled over, so extract is a poor substitute here.
- Trimming and servingTrim the caramelised edges with a serrated knife while the cakes are still just warm; cold puff shatters. Serve the day they are baked, plain with coffee or alongside a compote or ice.
G tteaux Cond f are a fixture of the classical French p ftisserie repertoire, a plain marriage of puff paste and almond icing. The name is generally traced to the princely house of Cond f, in the manner of a great many nineteenth-century dishes attached to noble titles after the fact rather than for any documented connection; a number of unrelated preparations, including a rice-and-apricot dessert, carry the same name. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection reflects the Waldorf's kitchen, and entries like this one read as working notes rather than instructions for a home cook: no oven time, no quantity of almond paste, no yield, because the pastry section would have known all three.