No. 3239

Genoese Cake

Gateau Genoise

Butter a pound cake mold and line it with paper. Have one pound of sugar, part of it being flavored with vanilla (No. 3165), in a basin with sixteen whole eggs; whip this till light, warming the preparation over a slow fire. To have this attain a proper degree of lightness it will be necessary to whip for at least forty minutes, then mix in one pound of sifted flour, and lastly half a pound of melted butter. Fill the mold three-quarters full with this, and bake in a slack oven for an hour and a quarter. Remove, unmold on a grate and cool thoroughly. Then pare it very straight and cover with a layer of apricot marmalade (No. 3675); ice with vanilla fondant (No. 58). After the icing has dried thoroughly slip the cake on a dish and decorate either with royal icing or fanciful cuts of fruits; surround with a circle of preserved plums and cherries.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A full-size genoise scaled for a professional pastry department: sixteen eggs, a pound each of sugar and flour, half a pound of butter. Everything depends on the foam, since there is no chemical leavening in it at all.

The hinge: the warm whipEggs and sugar are warmed over low heat while beating, to roughly 110F — warm to the fingertip, never hot enough to set the yolks. The warmth dissolves the sugar and lets the foam take up far more air; skip it and the cake bakes dense and low.
Forty minutes means forty minutes by handForty minutes of whipping implies hand work. In a stand mixer with the whisk, warm the eggs and sugar over a water bath first, then whip on high 8 to 12 minutes, until the batter falls in a ribbon that sits on the surface for several seconds before sinking.
Folding in the flour and butterSift the flour over the foam in three additions and fold with a large spatula, cutting down and lifting rather than stirring. Melted butter is heavy and will drop straight through the batter — slacken it first with a cupful of the batter, then fold that mixture back in.
"A slack oven"A low oven; call it 300F, and no higher than 325F. An hour and a quarter suits a deep mold, and it is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
The moldA pound cake mold here is a deep, straight-sided cake or loaf form. Butter it, line the base and sides with parchment, and fill only three-quarters full as directed — genoise rises more than it looks like it will.
Yield and scalingThis makes roughly 4 lb of batter, enough for two 9-inch deep pans or one very large mold, serving 20 to 30. Halving or quartering it works cleanly since the proportions are by weight.
Apricot marmalade and fondantThe marmalade is apricot preserve boiled down and strained — a glaze, not a chunky spread. It seals the crumb so the fondant does not soak in. Poured fondant should be warmed to about body temperature and thinned with a little syrup until it coats the back of a spoon.
Paring it straightTrim the domed top and square the sides with a long serrated knife once the cake is fully cold, ideally the next day. A warm genoise tears, and a crooked cake cannot be rescued by icing.

A Little History

Genoise takes its name from Genoa, and the whole-egg sponge is traditionally credited to Genoese pastry cooks working in France, though the attribution is old kitchen lore rather than documented fact. What is certain is that by the nineteenth century it had become the structural backbone of French pâtisserie: a lean, close-grained sponge sturdy enough to be split, soaked, layered, pared square and glazed. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York and author of The Epicurean (1894), files it among the large cakes for entremets — the sweet course that closed a formal dinner — and treats it exactly as a professional would, as a blank base finished with apricot glaze, fondant and a ring of preserved fruit. The instruction to whip for forty minutes is a reminder that before electric mixers, aeration was labor, and a kitchen brigade was what made a cake like this possible.