No. 3250

Neapolitan Cake

Gateau Napolitain

Crush one pound and ten ounces of almonds with a pound and a quarter of sugar; reduce to a fine powder; pass this through a sieve. Sift on the table two pounds of flour, make a hollow in the center and in it lay the almond and sugar powder, a pound and a half of butter, a pinch of salt and four whole eggs; work the whole together just enough to form a smooth, firm paste, for if worked too much it is liable to crumble. Lay it in a vessel and leave in a cool place to rest; one hour later divide this paste into sixteen or twenty even parts and roll them to a quarter of an inch thick by six and a quarter inches in diameter; empty out the centers with a two-inch pastry cutter. Have two of the flats a little thicker and two inches wider in diameter than the others; bake on a buttered and floured baking sheet in a hot oven, and as soon as done take them out and leave to cool under the pressure of a weight; pare the large rounds eight inches in diameter and put them once more under a weight; when cold ice either with white or pink icing (No. 102); mask the small flats with well-strained and reduced apricot marmalade (No. 3675); now lay them one over the other; pare them evenly to have the cake six inches in diameter, and cover the whole with well reduced and well-cooked apricot marmalade; place the cake on one of the large flats and over lay the second large one. Decorate around with fanciful cuts of almond gum paste and the top with a cupola of royal icing or gum paste. Ornament around the edge of the large flat with a double border of the same paste and arrange the cake on a richly decorated stand. This cake is intended for a sideboard. It can also be made with almond biscuit (No. 3229).

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a buffet showpiece rather than a dessert to slice at table: sixteen to twenty rings of almond shortbread stacked with apricot, then dressed in icing. Read it as an assembly project, and note that the quantities are professional.

Scale firstThe paste runs to nearly seven pounds of dough — 1 lb 10 oz almonds, 1 1/4 lb sugar, 2 lb flour, 1 1/2 lb butter, 4 eggs. Quartering it gives a workable home batch of four or five rings for a smaller stack.
Almonds and sugarCrushing blanched almonds with the sugar keeps them from turning to oil in the mortar. Modern equivalent: pulse whole blanched almonds with the sugar in a food processor, or substitute almond flour weight-for-weight with the sugar added separately.
"Hot oven"Conventionally read as somewhere around 400–425F, though Ranhofer gives no figure. The rounds are thin and sugar-heavy; they colour fast and want watching.
The hinge: weight them while hotAlmond paste of this kind puffs and warps. Pressing each round flat under a board or sheet pan the moment it leaves the oven, and again after trimming, is what makes twenty layers stack true. Skip it and the cake leans.
Working the pasteHis warning is real. Once the flour is damp, stop. Overworked, the high proportion of butter and almond makes a paste that shatters rather than cuts.
The ring shapeEach 6 1/4-inch round has a 2-inch hole cut from the center, so the finished stack is a tall ring; the two larger 8-inch rounds serve as base and lid. Chill the rolled discs before cutting for clean edges.
Apricot marmaladeNo. 3675 is apricot cooked down and strained — a stiff, glossy glaze, not a spreadable jam. Reduce good apricot preserve and sieve it; if it is loose, the layers will slide.
Icings and gum pasteNo. 102 is Ranhofer's icing, used here in white or pink; royal icing is egg white and icing sugar. Almond gum paste is close to what would now be called marzipan or a pastillage-type modelling paste — decorative and edible, but made to hold shape rather than to taste of much.
ServingA 6-inch stacked ring of this richness cuts into small wedges and will serve twenty or more. It keeps several days; the trimmings are worth saving as they are, being essentially almond shortbread.

A Little History

Gâteau napolitain is a fixture of nineteenth-century French pastry rather than an Italian dish — a stack of thin almond-paste rings glued with apricot and finished with icing and modelled sugar, in the tradition of the pièce montée that Carême's generation raised to architecture. Its Italian name is generally traced to the Neapolitan influence on French court cookery, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, included it in The Epicurean (1894) among the "Large Cakes for Entremets," and his closing line tells you what it was for: "This cake is intended for a sideboard." It was built to be looked at across a room full of people, cut late in the meal if at all — which explains the pared edges, the double border, the cupola of royal icing and the richly decorated stand.