No. 3189

Marshal Ney

Marechal Ney

Pound four ounces of peeled almonds with four ounces of powdered sugar and enough egg-white to have a fine paste; put this into a vessel and mix in two ounces of flour, two whole eggs and one stiffly beaten white. Push this preparation through a pocket provided with a three-eighths inch diameter socket on buttered sheets in two-inch lengths and bake them in a hot oven; remove and cool. Have four lightly oiled hexagonal tin rings ranging from five to eight inches in diameter and one and three-quarters inches high; cut the above marchpanes the same size as the sides of the hexagon; fasten these around the hexagonal rings with some sugar cooked to "small crack" (No. 171); unmold, stand one on top of the other, graduating the sizes, and fill the inside with alternate layers of vanilla bavarois (No. 3135), intercalated with small meringue shells made with fifteen egg-whites to one pound of sugar. On the top set one large meringue filled with Bavarian cream and coated with sugar cooked to "crack;" sprinkle over the sugar while hot some finely sliced pistachios.

← No. 3188 Macaronade Cold Entremets — Creams, Jellies & Charlottes No. 3190 Mosaic with Cream →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a pièce montée in miniature: four hexagonal tiers walled in almond biscuit, filled with vanilla bavarois and meringues, and glued together with cooked sugar. Read it as an assembly project with four components made in advance, not a single procedure.

The hinge: the sugar is your mortarEverything structural depends on sugar cooked to Ranhofer's "small crack" and the final glaze at "crack"; the recipe points to his table of sugar degrees (No. 171) rather than giving a temperature, and modern tables put small crack in roughly the 270–290°F band, with crack above it. Too soft and it stays tacky and the walls slump; too far and it colors and turns brittle. Have the biscuits cut, the rings oiled and the work surface cleared before the sugar goes on the heat, because the working time is short.
"Pocket provided with a socket"A piping bag fitted with a plain round tip of 3/8 inch (10 mm). The two-inch lengths are piped side by side and then trimmed to the exact width of each hexagon face after baking, so pipe generously — they shrink and warp slightly.
OvenRanhofer specifies only a "hot oven"; for thin almond biscuit that is usually read as somewhere around 400°F. Bake until the edges are set and just blond, roughly 8–10 minutes; these are thin and darken quickly. Cool flat on the sheet or they curl.
MarchpanesThe paste here is not marzipan candy but a piped almond biscuit — 4 oz blanched almonds and 4 oz powdered sugar pounded to a paste (a food processor does this, with the egg white added in a trickle to keep it from oiling), then loosened with 2 oz flour, two whole eggs and a beaten white.
The hexagonal ringsTin rings from five to eight inches across and 1¾ inches deep are not a stock item. Cut collars from stiff acetate or from cake board and tape them into hexagons at the four diameters; the biscuit wall is the finished surface anyway, and the form is removed before serving.
The meringue ratioFifteen whites to one pound of sugar works out to roughly equal weights of white and sugar — a low-sugar meringue by modern standards, softer and less stable than the two-parts-sugar-to-one-part-white formula common today. Dry the shells slowly at 200°F until they lift cleanly, and fill them only at the last moment or they weep.
Timing the bavaroisThe vanilla bavarois must be layered while still fluid enough to settle around the meringues but far enough along that it does not drown them. Chill it over ice, stirring, until it mounds on the spoon, then work fast; the tiers need several hours in the refrigerator before they can be stacked and unmolded.
YieldThe recipe gives no yield; four tiers of this size would serve a dozen or more. It is cut down through the layers in wedges, and it does not keep — assemble the day it is eaten.

A Little History

The name honors Michel Ney, the Napoleonic marshal called le Brave des braves, who was shot in Paris in December 1815 after the return from Elba. Naming a moulded cold sweet after a soldier, a singer or a visiting dignitary was routine practice in the grand nineteenth-century kitchen — Charles Ranhofer, who ran the Delmonico's kitchens in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, filled his chapters with such tributes, and the dish itself usually has no documented connection to its namesake beyond the compliment. What the recipe really records is the Carême inheritance: the belief that a dessert should be built as architecture, with walls, tiers and a crowning ornament, and that a pastry cook should be able to hold sugar at a named degree of heat and use it as cement. The graduated hexagons stacked smallest on top are a scaled-down version of the towering pièces montées that once stood on banquet tables for show as much as for eating.