No. 3192

Mossaganem

Prepare a little cream cake paste (No.132). Cut some round pieces of white paper four inches in diameter, and butter the edges lightly; lay the paste in a socket pocket and push it to resemble crowns on the edges of these papers, then lay them on a baking sheet; egg over the paste and bake in a slack oven. After removing the crowns detach them from the papers and let cool off; open them all around at their base, and fill them with apricot marmalade (No.3675) pushed through a cornet, then range them in the center of a cold dish on top of each other, alternating each layer with one of frangipane cream with vanilla (No.44), to which pounded almonds and hazel-nut butter have been added. Cover the inside of the hollow formed by the crowns with a thin layer of whipped cream sweetened and flavored with vanilla. With this same cream cover the entire outside of the cake, smooth the surface and decorate with more of the cream pushed through a cornet. At the last moment decorate the hollow with strawberries, sprinkled over with a little thick syrup and maraschino.

← No. 3191 Moscovite of Strawberries Cold Entremets — Creams, Jellies & Charlottes No. 3193 Ornaments for Cold Desserts →

For the Modern Kitchen

A stacked gâteau of choux rings, apricot, and almond-hazelnut frangipane, built and served cold. Ranhofer assumes you already know his numbered base recipes, so most of the work is in reading between the cross-references.

Cream cake paste is chouxNo. 132 is pâte à choux — the boiled flour-butter-egg paste used for éclairs. Pipe it stiff enough to hold a ring; a paste that slumps will bake into a flat disc rather than a crown.
"Socket pocket" and "cornet"A pocket with a socket is a piping bag fitted with a metal tube. A cornet is a small cone rolled from parchment, used for the finer piping of marmalade and cream.
Slack ovenA slack or slow oven is a cool one; the book works by such descriptions rather than by degrees, so treat any figure as an approximation. Choux baked cool from the start will not rise properly; modern practice is to set the rings at 400-425F until puffed and coloured, then drop the heat to dry the interiors through. A solid-fuel oven losing heat as the bake went on would have done something like that in one motion.
The papersButtered paper rounds are a release layer — parchment does the same and needs no butter. The four-inch diameter sets the size of each tier; cut a few progressively smaller rounds if you want the stack to taper.
Hazel-nut butterMost likely hazelnuts pounded to a paste, which is what suits a frangipane already carrying pounded almonds; note that the same phrase was also used in the period for beurre noisette, browned butter, and the recipe does not say which is meant. If you take it as nut paste, ground toasted hazelnuts worked until they slacken give the right thing, and unsweetened jarred hazelnut butter is an acceptable substitute.
Apricot marmaladeNo. 3675 is a thick apricot purée cooked down with sugar, closer to a stiff jam than to citrus marmalade. It must be firm enough to hold inside the split crowns without weeping into the choux.
MaraschinoThe clear liqueur made from Marasca cherries, pits included, not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. The recipe wants it sprinkled over the strawberries along with a little thick syrup, at the last moment before serving.
Assemble lateChoux goes soft within a couple of hours of meeting cream and fruit. Bake and fill the crowns ahead, but stack, coat, and decorate close to service. The original reserves "at the last moment" for the strawberries; the same logic is worth extending to the whole construction.
YieldThe recipe does not say how many crowns to make or how many it feeds; the number of tiers is left to the cook, and the finished stack is a centrepiece to be cut down through the layers in wedges.

A Little History

The name is Mostaganem, the Mediterranean port in western Algeria, taken by French forces in 1833 during the conquest that made Algeria a French colony. Nineteenth-century French cooks attached place-names of this kind to gateaux alongside the names of opera singers and duchesses. The construction here is French rather than North African, and shares its stacked choux with the gateau Saint-Honore. Charles Ranhofer, who cooked at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, trained in that French tradition and brought its repertoire and vocabulary with him, cross-references and all.