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Flame Cake
Beat together the yolks of ten eggs with half a pound of caster-sugar for twenty minutes; warm six ounces of butter, beat till creamy, and mix it in with the eggs, adding half a pound of the best white flour, and the grated peel and juice of one lemon. Whisk the whites of the ten eggs to a froth, and mix them into this preparation. Butter a shallow cake-tin, pour in this mixture, and bake in a moderate oven. When it is done, remove from the pan, leaving it until the following day. Just when serving, put it on a dish, soak it in brandy, set fire to it, and serve at once.
A leavening-free sponge in the genoise family, baked a day ahead and set alight at the table. Two things decide the outcome: how much air you beat into the eggs, and how gently you fold.
- The hinge — air is the only leaveningThere is no baking powder here, so all the rise comes from the beaten yolks and whites. Beat the yolks and sugar to the ribbon stage (8-10 minutes in a stand mixer rather than the twenty by hand), work in the butter and then the flour and lemon as written, and fold the whisked whites in last with a spatula, stopping the moment no streaks remain.
- WeightsHalf a pound of caster sugar is 225 g, about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons; half a pound of flour is 225 g, roughly 1 3/4 cups scooped and levelled. Six ounces of butter is 170 g, or one and a half sticks. Weigh if you can, since a heavy hand with the flour will flatten the cake.
- Caster sugarSold in the US as superfine or bar sugar. Ordinary granulated pulsed for twenty seconds in a food processor works; it dissolves faster into the yolks, which is the point.
- Warmed butter"warm" means soft and just fluid, not hot. Butter hot enough to be thin and oily will deflate the yolk foam on contact. Temper it by stirring a spoonful of the yolk mixture into the butter first, then folding that back in.
- Moderate ovenRead it as around 350F. The recipe says only "shallow cake-tin"; a sheet-style pan of roughly 9 by 13 inches, greased and lined, suits this quantity, with the batter about an inch deep, and will take 25-35 minutes, until the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- The overnight restThe recipe is explicit that the cake waits until the following day. A day-old sponge is firmer and drier and takes up brandy better than a fresh warm one, which will slump when soaked; the recipe itself gives no reason for the delay.
- Soaking and flamingFigure on about half a cup of brandy. Warm it gently in a small pan off the heat source before lighting, since cold spirit will not catch. Light it with a long match at arm's length, away from the extractor fan and anything overhanging, and let it burn out on its own rather than trying to blow it out.
- YieldA 9-by-13 sponge cuts into 10 to 12 portions. Serve plain, or with lightly whipped cream added after the flame has died.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, and much of it reflects the Franco-German repertoire that ran New York's grand hotel dining rooms at the end of the century. The cake itself is a plain sponge, raised by beaten eggs rather than chemical leavening — the yolks worked with sugar and the whisked whites folded in — of the sort a European-trained pastry cook would have made without thinking; what makes it a "flame cake" is the tableside performance of the brandy. Flambéed dishes were a staple of the Gilded Age restaurant precisely because they required a dining room, a captain and an audience — the food could be prepared a day ahead in the kitchen while the spectacle happened in front of the guest. The instruction to bake it and leave it until the following day is a working hotel kitchen's economy showing through the glamour.