No. 3261

St. Honore and St. Honore Sultana

St. Honore et St. Honore Sultane

Roll out some very fine short paste (No. 135) to obtain a flat three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness and eight inches in diameter; lay it on a round baking pan dampened with water, prick it all over and with a pocket furnished with a half-inch diameter socket push flat on the edges of this a heavy string of cream cake paste (No. 132). Egg over twice and bake in a slack oven for ten to fifteen minutes. Dress on another tart plate sixteen small round cream cakes (No. 3294), three-quarters of an inch in diameter; egg over and bake them in a moderate oven, then detach from the plate by slipping a knife underneath. Peel two oranges, divide them in sections, leaving on only the fine skin covering the pulp, being careful not to break it, and range them on a grate to dry, either in the air or in a heater. Wash in hot water some candied fruits, such as cherries, apricots, angelica and pears; wipe dry and cut the apricots in four, the angelica in lozenges, the pears in four and leave the cherries whole; have also some loose green grapes, eight pieces of each kind of fruit. Cook some sugar to "crack" (No. 171); first dip in the cream cakes and arrange them on an oiled baking tin, then drain; proceed the same with the oranges, grapes, apricots, angelica, cherries, pears, etc. On the band fasten the cream cakes with sugar cooked to "crack;" on top of these place a row of quartered oranges, on each quartered orange a glazed cherry, and between each one of the sections place an angelica lozenge or one of the grapes; slip on a dish covered with lace paper. Fill the St. Honore with St. Honore cream (No. 49), and serve.

St. Honore Sultana.—Replace the St. Honore cream by a vanilla bavarois cream (No. 3135) with plenty of whipped cream, and over the fruits place a spun sugar sultana the shape of an ogive (No. 3193), and around quarters of apricots and pears, both glazed.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have his numbered base recipes to hand; translated into current terms this is a choux-ringed short pastry base filled with crème Chiboust and crowned with caramel-dipped fruit. The hinge is the sugar: everything that touches it must be bone dry, or the glaze weeps and the construction slumps.

The two pastes"Very fine short paste" (No. 135) is a sweet short crust; "cream cake paste" (No. 132) is pâte à choux. The disc is three-sixteenths of an inch thick and eight inches across.
Pocket and socketA pastry bag fitted with a plain half-inch round tip. The "heavy string" piped on the edge is a single thick ring of choux that bakes into the wall of the cake.
Oven numbersA "slack" oven is usually taken as roughly 300-325F, "moderate" as around 350F, though period usage varied. Modern practice starts choux hotter, around 400-425F, to force it up, then drops the heat to dry it out; at a slack heat alone the ring and the small puffs may spread rather than rise.
Sugar to "crack"No. 171's casse is hard crack, roughly 300-310F. Work over a bowl of ice water to arrest it, and dip with a fork or skewer rather than fingers; sugar at that temperature burns far worse than boiling water.
Drying the fruitThe oranges are divided into sections with the fine inner membrane left on (not supremes, which are cut free of it), then air-dried so surface moisture does not dissolve the caramel. Grapes and washed candied fruit must be wiped completely dry for the same reason.
AngelicaCandied angelica stem, once standard for green decoration, is now hard to find outside specialist suppliers. Candied citron or thin strips of candied lime peel stand in visually; nothing tastes quite the same.
St. Honore creamNo. 49 is Ranhofer's St. Honore cream, the preparation known as crème Chiboust: pastry cream lightened with meringue, in some versions with a little gelatin. It sets softly and is best piped in shortly before serving. The Sultana version substitutes a vanilla bavarois folded with whipped cream, which sets firmer.
The sultanaAn ogive is a pointed arch; the spun sugar of No. 3193 forms a pointed dome or veil set over the fruit. Spun sugar collapses in humidity, so make it last and assemble as late as you can.
TimingBake the base, ring and small puffs a day ahead and keep them dry. Caramel-glaze, fill and garnish within two or three hours of serving; assembled, it will not survive overnight.

A Little History

The gâteau Saint-Honoré takes its name from Honoratus of Amiens, patron saint of bakers, and is generally traced to the Chiboust pâtisserie on the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris around the middle of the nineteenth century — the same house credited with the meringue-lightened pastry cream that still bears the name Chiboust and which Ranhofer here calls simply "St. Honore cream." By the time Charles Ranhofer set down The Epicurean in 1894, after decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, the cake had become a standard piece of the French pastry repertoire abroad, and his instructions read like a workshop note to a trained assistant: base numbers, socket sizes, counts of eight pieces of each candied fruit. The "Sultane" variant belongs to a nineteenth-century fashion for sugar-work domes and veils — decorative cages spun over molds, the name often said to evoke an ogival arch or a sultana's canopy, though this is traditional explanation rather than documented etymology — a reminder that the showpiece end of the trade was judged as much on architecture as on flavor.