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Galettes
Sift a pound and a half of flour onto a board; make a hollow in the center; put a quarter of a pound of slightly warmed butter, a little salt and half a point of cold water. Work the butter well with the water, gradually mixing in the flour so as to give it the consistency of puff paste. Let it remain for fifteen minutes, and in the meantime work half a pound of butter in a cloth until it is quite firm, then give it a flat square shape. Make the paste into a flat square shape also, put the square of butter on it and cover it over with the edges of the paste that project; give it five turns like puff paste and at the last turn make it about one inch in thickness. Cut it into a round shape with scalloped edges, put it upside down on a baking-dish, brush it over with egg and mark it in lines with a sharp knife. Bake in a moderate oven for forty minutes, and just before taking it out, sprinkle over with sugar glaze. It is then ready for use.
American Gingerbread (Southern).
Put one pint of molasses into a copper basin, warm it, and melt half a pound of butter in it; then mix in half a pound of moist sugar and three well-beaten eggs, add ground ginger to taste, one pint of milk and two teaspoonfuls of baking-powder mixed up with one pound of flour. The milk and flour should be added alternately and a little at a time. When thoroughly mixed, pour it into oval buttered pans and bake in a moderately quick oven. Serve either hot or cold.
Two recipes run together on this page: a galette of rough puff pastry, and a molasses gingerbread that follows without a break. Both are workable, but the measurements need translating and one word is plainly a printer's error.
- "Half a point of cold water"This is a typesetting error for half a pint, which is one cup (8 fl oz) — a sensible hydration for 1 1/2 lb of flour when a quarter pound of butter is already worked in. Add it gradually rather than all at once; flour absorbency varies and the dough should come together as a firm, slightly tacky mass, not a slack one.
- The hinge: keep the butter block and the dough the same firmnessWorking the half pound of butter in a cloth is an old way of beating out the water and making it plastic without melting it. If the butter is harder than the dough it tears through in shards; if softer it smears and the layers vanish. Both should dent under a thumb with the same resistance, and both should be cold.
- Five turnsA "turn" here is a single fold in three plus a roll-out. Rest the dough in the refrigerator between turns — fifteen to twenty minutes is enough — rather than working straight through.
- Oven temperaturesA moderate oven for the galette is 350°F. The "moderately quick" oven for the gingerbread is about 375°F. Forty minutes at 350°F for an inch-thick galette is right, but check at thirty.
- Upside down, and whyUpside down -- Turn the cut round over before baking, as the recipe directs. Use a sharp cutter and press straight down; twisting seals the layers shut.
- Sugar glazeIn this period that means either a thin water icing brushed on hot, or sifted icing sugar dusted over and flashed under high heat to melt into a gloss. Either works; the icing is the more forgiving.
- Moist sugarA soft, damp, partly refined sugar — light brown sugar is the closest supermarket equivalent, weight for weight.
- The copper basinProlonged contact between acidic mixtures and unlined copper is best avoided. Use any nonreactive saucepan; the recipe only wants gentle heat to melt the butter into the molasses.
- YieldThe gingerbread batter fills two standard loaf pans or one 9x13; bake loaves about 45–55 minutes, testing with a skewer.
A galette in French usage is any flat round cake, and this one is the pâtissier's version: nothing but puff paste, egg wash, and a sugar glaze, scored on top so the layers show. It is the same idea that survives in the galette des rois eaten at Epiphany, minus the almond filling. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf dining rooms in the era when American hotel kitchens were staffed and organised on French lines, and the book reflects that: a classical Parisian pastry sits directly above a Southern molasses gingerbread with no transition at all, because both were things the kitchen was expected to turn out on demand. The gingerbread's pint of molasses is a reminder of how much cheaper molasses was than refined sugar in nineteenth-century America, and why so much regional baking is dark, damp and heavily spiced.