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Vanilla Cake
Prepare about one pound of fine puff paste, roll it out thin, sprinkle over a few drops of essence of vanilla, fold the paste over and work it in. Place it on a bakingsheet, have it six inches wide and two and one-half inches thick or thereabouts; surround it with a band of thick paper to prevent its spreading while cooking, brush the surface with egg, decorate it into any desired form, place it in a quick oven and bake it for about two hours and a half or more. This cake must be allowed to remain in the oven until entirely done, otherwise it will be soft and uneatable. When done, sprinkle over some sugar, and serve cold. If the vanilla flavoring is not liked, the cakes may be flavored with almost anything else, such as chopped orange-flowers, orange or citron peel, currants, Parmesan cheese, or any flavoring that may be preferred. Walnut Cake (Large).
Warm one-half pound of butter, and beat together with one-half pound of sugar until creamy; then sift in one-fourth pound of flour that has been mixed with one teaspoonful of baking-powder and a pinch of salt. Add one-half pound of peeled and chopped walnuts, and flavor with one teaspoonful of vanilla essence. Whip the whites of eight eggs to a stiff froth, and stir them into the above mixture. Butter a cake-tin, pour in the mixture, and bake for half an hour in a moderate oven. When done, turn the cake out onto a tin, and leave it until cold.
Two recipes run together here: a solid block of puff paste baked as a cake, and a flourless-ish walnut sponge. The first is the odd one, and it needs the most translating.
- The oven instruction contradicts itselfThe oven instruction sits awkwardly with the timing -- a "quick oven" is usually read as somewhere around 400-425F, and two and a half hours at that heat would scorch the outside long before the centre dried. The recipe names no second temperature, but in practice a hot start to lift the layers followed by a long spell at much lower heat is the only way to get there. Watch it rather than trusting the clock.
- Two and a half inches of puff pasteThis is not a mistake. It is a deep gateau of stacked puff, baked until the centre is crisp all the way through — hence the warning that an underdone one is "soft and uneatable." Expect something closer to a giant vol-au-vent case than a sponge.
- The band of paperA strip of stiff parchment or brown paper tied round the block as a collar, keeping the sides vertical while the layers rise. Parchment and butcher's twine do the job; foil conducts too much heat.
- Essence of vanillaVanilla essences of the period varied in strength, so treat "a few drops" literally: an eighth of a teaspoon or so of modern extract, sprinkled on the rolled-out paste and folded in as the recipe directs. Much more and the paste turns wet and refuses to laminate.
- Orange-flowers and Parmesan"chopped orange-flowers" probably means candied or preserved orange blossom, hard to source now; orange-flower water on the sugar dusting is the nearest substitute. The Parmesan version is savoury rather than sweet.
- Walnut cake weightsA quarter pound of flour is about one cup; half a pound of butter is two sticks, half a pound of sugar just over a cup, half a pound of walnuts about two cups chopped. The flour is deliberately scant — the eight beaten whites do the lifting.
- Moderate oven350F. Half an hour suits a shallow tin of about 9 inches; a deeper tin will want 40-45 minutes and a skewer test.
- Folding the whitesThe butter-sugar base is stiff before the whites go in. Slacken it with a spoonful of the froth first, then fold the rest in two additions, or the whites collapse and the cake bakes dense.
Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name carried the Waldorf's reputation, published his cook book in 1896, and it is tempting to read this entry as a trace of a French-trained hotel kitchen: "cake" here may well be the French gateau in its older, wider sense, covering pastry as readily as batter. A thick baked block of puff paste, collared with paper and scored into a pattern on top, belongs to the same family as the gateau feuillete and the Pithiviers, where the whole point is the contrast between a lacquered egg-washed lid and hundreds of dry, shattering layers beneath. The list of alternative flavourings — orang-flowers, citron, currants, Parmesan — reads more as a set of variations than as separate recipes; the inclusion of cheese among the sweets is a reminder that the savoury-sweet line was drawn differently in a hotel pastry room than it is now.