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Genoese Pastry
Warm four ounces of fresh butter, heat it, then mix in four ounces of sugar, and whip the two together until creamy; beat in, one at a time, four eggs, then stir in quickly four ounces of finely-sifted flour, and work it till quite smooth. Butter a flat tin thick, pour the mixture onto it spreading it to about one-half inch in thickness, and bake at once for fifteen minutes in a brisk oven. When cooked turn the pastry onto a sieve, and leave until cool, the underside uppermost. Spread a thin layer of apricot jam over the pastry, then a layer of chocolate icing, and put it to dry for a minute in an oven. When quite cold cut the pastry into various fancy shapes, and serve.
This is a creamed genoise sheet, cut into petits fours. The hinge is the flour: it goes in quickly, off the heat of enthusiasm, and is worked only until smooth — beat it hard and the cake turns tough and rubbery instead of tender.
- WeightsFour ounces each of butter, sugar and flour, plus four eggs: 1 stick butter, a generous 1/2 cup sugar, about 1 cup flour minus a tablespoon. The four eggs weigh nearly twice as much as any one of the other ingredients, so this is richer in egg than an equal-weight pound cake. Weigh if you can; the balance is the whole point.
- "Warm... heat it"This means bring the butter to soft, spreadable room temperature, not melt it. Melted butter will not hold air when creamed and the sheet will bake dense.
- Eggs one at a timeHave them at room temperature and beat each in fully before adding the next. Cold eggs added quickly will split the emulsion; if it curdles, a spoonful of the flour will bring it back.
- A brisk ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 400F. A half-inch sheet colours fast, so check at ten minutes — the fifteen given here is the outside limit for a thin, well-buttered tin.
- The flat tinA quarter sheet pan or a 9x13 tin will take this batter, though it will spread somewhat thinner than the half-inch called for. Butter it heavily as instructed, or line with parchment; there is no leavening but air, and a stuck edge will tear the crumb.
- Turn onto a sieveA wire cooling rack does the same job. Inverting it puts the flat underside up, which is the surface you want for jam and icing.
- The apricot layerWarm the jam and push it through a sieve first, so it spreads thin and sets to a seal. Unstrained jam leaves lumps that show through the glaze.
- Chocolate icingNo formula is given. A poured chocolate fondant or a simple glaze of melted chocolate thinned with a little cream or syrup is period-appropriate; the brief return to the oven is only to dry and set the surface — the recipe allows a minute.
- YieldAbout 24 to 30 small fancy shapes from a quarter sheet. Cut with a hot dry knife or small cutters once the icing is fully cold and firm.
Genoise takes its name from Genoa, and the sponge is generally traced to Italian pastry work absorbed into the French repertoire, where it became the standard base for layered gateaux and for petits fours glacés. This version uses a creamed method rather than the whole-egg-over-hot-water foam most modern pastry books teach, and the finish — apricot glaze under a chocolate coat, then cut into fancy shapes — is the sort of assembly that lets one sheet be turned into several dozen identical petits fours. Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, was not himself a cook, but his 1896 book collected the working formulas of the hotel's kitchens, and this recipe, whatever its origin, reads like a pastry chef's shorthand: ingredients by the even four ounces, no yield given, and the assumption that the reader already knows what chocolate icing to reach for.