No. 3244

Lady Cake

Gateau des Dames

Put fourteen ounces of butter and twenty ounces of sugar in a metal bowl and work together with the hands for fifteen or twenty minutes to have it quite frothy, then add four ounces of almonds, including a few bitter ones, pounded with a little water, and work again for a few moments. Now put in one gill of brandy or rum, twenty ounces of flour and finally twenty very stiffly whipped egg-whites. Butter a pound-cake mold, line it throughout with paper and fill it three-quarters full with the preparation; bake in a very slow oven. (Once the cake is in the oven it must not be touched until baked.) Take it out, unmold and leave to get thoroughly cold. Then ice with royal icing (No. 101) and stand it at once on a lace-paper covered board. After the icing has dried decorate the cake with more royal icing.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

The obstacle here is not technique but a single ingredient: Ranhofer specifies bitter almonds, which are not a legal or safe food item in the United States and cannot be substituted into this formula by guesswork.

Bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and wetted — exactly what this recipe does when it pounds them with water. Their sale for eating is prohibited in the US, and the quantity implied by "a few" in a four-ounce measure is unquantified and unmonitored. This is why the cake should not be made from this text; use a current lady cake recipe instead.
Why they were usedThey were valued for the intense almond-extract aroma that sweet almonds lack. That flavor compound, benzaldehyde, is what commercial almond extract supplies today, and it is the reason nineteenth-century bakers reached for the bitter nut.
Royal icingRoyal icing (No. 101) is conventionally raw egg white beaten with sugar and left to air-dry rather than cooked — the recipe here waits for the icing to dry before decorating. It therefore carries the ordinary risk of uncooked egg; modern practice uses pasteurized whites or meringue powder.
The units, for readingA gill is half a cup. Ranhofer weighs his dry ingredients, flour and sugar at twenty ounces each, which reflects the professional habit of the Delmonico's kitchen rather than the household cup-measure of American cookbooks of the same decade; the brandy, though, is given by volume and the whites by count.
"A very slow oven"There is no fixed modern equivalent; period conversions for a very slow oven are variously given somewhere in the range of 250-300F. A cake of this size, built on twenty stiffly whipped whites and no chemical leavening, depends on a long gentle set — hence the instruction not to touch it once it is in.
The lined pound-cake moldRanhofer gives no reason for buttering and then papering the mold throughout, but paper lining would help the cake come out whole and unmarked, which matters for a cake that is to be iced and displayed. The batter goes in only three-quarters full, presumably to allow for lift from the whipped whites.

A Little History

Lady cake — gâteau des dames in Ranhofer's French — belongs to the nineteenth-century family of white cakes made with egg whites only, the pale counterpart to the yolk-rich pound cakes and the darker fruitcakes served alongside them. The name is usually read as reflecting a period convention in which delicacy, whiteness and almond flavor were coded as feminine; "lady cake" and "gentleman's cake" appear in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and a comparable pairing of a white iced cake with a dark fruited one is familiar from wedding tables as bride's cake and groom's cake. Almond was a common flavoring for these cakes before vanilla extract became cheap and reliable in American kitchens. The Epicurean (1894) records the repertoire of Delmonico's in New York under Charles Ranhofer, and the placement here among "Large Cakes for Entremets" is telling: this was a decorated centerpiece, set on a lace-paper board and piped with royal icing.