No. 3232

Breton Cake

Gateau Breton

Set in a basin one pound and a quarter of sugar, eighteen eggs and a small pinch of salt; beat continuously for twenty-five to thirty minutes so as to have it very light, then add six ounces of almonds, including an ounce of bitter ones, these to be pounded very finely with one egg. Continue the beating process for a few minutes longer and then mix in a pound and a half of sifted flour and finally ten ounces of melted butter. Distribute this preparation into a set of six Breton molds, having these buttered and floured; fill them up to the top and bake in a slack oven. Remove as fast as they are done, unmold on a grate, let cool and then pare very straight. Ice the smallest as well as the fourth one in size with white vanilla fondant (No. 58); the second and fifth with pink strawberry fondant and the third and sixth with chocolate fondant. Dry the icings well then dress the cakes on an office paste foundation in a pyramid, one on the other, alternating the colors and graduating the various sizes. Fill the hollow formed in the cake with Quillet cream (No. 48), and decorate with more of this pushed through a cornet. Keep the cake in a cool place until required for serving.

← No. 3231 Savoy Biscuit Large Cakes for Entremets No. 3233 Crown of Brioche →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

The structure of this cake — six graduated sponge layers, iced in three colors and stacked into a pyramid — is straightforward pastry work. The almond mixture is not, and it is the reason this page is for reading rather than baking.

The bitter almondsThe recipe calls for an ounce of bitter almonds pounded finely with an egg. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding with egg does. Their sale for food use is prohibited in the United States and restricted elsewhere. Hydrogen cyanide is volatile and heat drives some of it off, but an ounce of raw kernels is not a negligible amount and nothing on this page tells you how much survives the bake.
Why substitution is not a footnoteAlmond extract and modern bitter-almond flavoring are made to supply the scent without the glycoside, so the aroma Ranhofer wanted survives; the chemistry does not. If you want to bake something of this kind, work from a current recipe for a layered genoise or pain de Gênes rather than adapting this one.
Eighteen eggs, no leaveningThe entire rise comes from twenty-five to thirty minutes of beating whole eggs with sugar — a professional-kitchen labor figure from the era of standing arm work. It tells you the batter was expected to reach the ribbon stage and hold it, which is why the flour and melted butter go in last and quickly.
"Slack oven"The nineteenth-century term for the coolest working heat of a cooling brick or coal oven, used for large deep cakes that would crust before the center set. It is a description of a falling fire, not a thermostat setting.
Breton moldsThe recipe calls for a set of six, and the instruction to graduate the sizes when stacking means they differed in size. The page says nothing further about their form. Graduated cake pans are the nearest modern equivalent.
The cross-referencesNo. 58 is Ranhofer's fondant and No. 48 his Quillet cream, a rich butter-and-sugar cream; the name is usually traced to a Parisian pâtissier called Quillet. Neither recipe can be read off this page; both live elsewhere in The Epicurean.
Office pasteA stiff sugar-and-flour paste used as a display base for pièces montées. Hard and not really meant to be eaten: structural furniture rather than part of the dessert.

A Little History

Gâteau breton in Brittany today means a dense, deeply buttered cake built on egg yolks and salted butter, marked with a crosshatch on top; Ranhofer's version is something else, a light whole-egg sponge scaled into six sizes and assembled into a tiered pyramid. This is from the Large Cakes for Entremets section of a book written for Delmonico's in New York in 1894, where a regional name on a dining-room piece need not imply any claim of provincial authenticity. The stacked, iced, cream-filled construction belongs to the tradition of the pièce montée, the built-up sugar architecture generally traced to Carême in the early nineteenth century, in which a dessert was expected to be carried in whole and looked at before it was cut. Bitter almonds were then a standard flavoring in professional pastry across Europe and America — cookbooks of the period specify them freely alongside sweet almonds — and their regulation as a food ingredient came only later.