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Leaf Cake
Blanch and pound one-half pound of sweet almonds with half a dozen bitter ones; rub the yolks of eight hard-boiled eggs until quite smooth. Mix three-quarters of a pound of butter with a pound and a quarter of flour, and when quite smooth stir in the above ingredients with one-half pound of caster-sugar, three well-beaten eggs and a sufficient quantity of milk to make a consistent paste. Work the mixture thoroughly, then lay it on a paste-board on which some flour has been sifted, dividing it into six equal portions, and rolling them out very thin. Butter a baking-sheet, lay the cakes on it, brush them over with a paste-brush dipped in beaten egg, and bake to a light yellow in a slow oven. When cooked slip one of the cakes off the bakingsheet, cover it with a coating of any kind of preserve, place another cake on the top of that, coat that also with preserve, and so on till the last cake is on the top. Mask the top of the last cake with the finest white sugar icing, trim all evenly around the edges with a sharp knife, and serve when the icing is quite dry.
This is a layered almond shortbread from the Waldorf kitchen, and it is readable as a historical document rather than a set of instructions to follow. One ingredient puts it out of reach.
- The bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which converts to hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them in a mortar with sweet almonds accomplishes. Their sale for eating is prohibited in the United States, and in the period this book was written they were a common flavouring precisely because a few gave a strong marzipan note that sweet almonds could not.
- Why baking does not settle itSome of the volatile cyanide is driven off by heat, but the amount retained depends on the size of the nuts, how finely they were ground, how long the paste stood and how thin the cakes were rolled. The recipe specifies neither weight nor size for the six bitter almonds, so there is no way to reason about the dose from the text. If you want a layered almond cake, work from a current recipe.
- Almond extract is not the same thingModern almond extract is benzaldehyde, the flavour compound, without the cyanogenic glycoside. It is what nineteenth-century bitter almonds were being used for, but substituting it does not make this particular set of instructions safe to follow as written.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar, finer than granulated and coarser than confectioners'. Its fineness would help it dissolve into a stiff butter-and-flour paste without leaving grit, though the recipe gives no reason for specifying it.
- "A slow oven"Around 300F in period terms. The point of it here is that the cakes are rolled very thin and wanted to dry to a pale straw colour rather than brown — Oscar's phrase is "a light yellow."
- The hard-boiled yolksSieved cooked yolk was a standard enricher in Continental pastry, contributing fat and colour without the water and setting power of raw egg. It gives a short, sandy crumb closer to a sablé than to a modern cake.
- What the finished thing isSix thin sheets stacked with preserve and iced on top, then trimmed evenly around the edges with a knife: a layered torte of a Central European type. The recipe does not say what shape it is trimmed to or how it is cut for serving.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book gathers the repertoire of a hotel kitchen staffed largely by European-trained cooks, and this is a Central European layered biscuit-torte rather than anything American: thin rolled sheets of rich almond paste, stacked with preserve and masked with white icing, of a type found across German and Austrian pastry work. The bitter almond was a routine larder item in the nineteenth century, sold alongside sweet almonds and called for by the half-dozen in cakes, custards and ratafias, and cookbooks of the era treat it with no more ceremony than nutmeg. Its dangers were known — poisoning cases from bitter almond oil are documented through the Victorian period — but regulation came later. The layering technique, with each sheet baked flat on a buttered sheet and assembled cold, survives in Hungarian and Austrian pastry to this day.