No. 3263

Favart Cake

Gateau Favart

Whip sixteen eggs in a basin with one pound of powdered sugar and two ounces of vanilla sugar (No. 3165); beat till very light while heating slightly, then stir in with a spoon one pound of sifted flour and later three-quarters of a pound of melted butter. Butter a hexagonal mold (Fig. 139) with clarified butter, flour it over and fill it three-quarters full with the preparation. Bake in a slow oven; when done, unmold on a grate and when thoroughly cold cover with peach marmalade (No. 3675), ice with kirsch icing (No. 102), dredging the top with chopped burnt almonds and some small one-eighth inch squares of angelica and citron.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a large génoise baked in a hexagonal mold, then glazed and decorated — no leavening but the eggs, so the whipping stage decides whether it works.

The hinge: the egg foamWhip eggs and sugar in a bowl over barely simmering water only until warm to the touch (about 110F), then off the heat until the mixture falls in a thick ribbon and holds a trace for several seconds. Fold in the flour in three additions and the butter last, and stop the moment it is combined; the butter deflates the foam quickly.
Butter temperatureThe melted butter must be warm, not hot — around 100F. Poured in hot it collapses the batter, and cold it seizes into streaks that sink to the bottom.
"Slow oven"Read this as a low-to-moderate oven, roughly 300 to 325F. A cake this deep needs the lower heat to set through without a domed, cracked crust; test with a skewer rather than by time.
Scale, not cupsOne pound flour, one pound sugar, twelve ounces butter, plus the two ounces of vanilla sugar — weigh them rather than measuring by volume.
Vanilla sugarNo. 3165 is Ranhofer's vanilla sugar, of the usual sort: sugar pounded and sifted with vanilla beans and kept for use. Two ounces of it is the flavoring for the whole cake; a scraped bean plus two ounces of sugar, or a couple of teaspoons of extract added with the eggs, is a rough stand-in.
Peach marmalade and kirsch icingThe marmalade here is a thick, reduced peach jam used warm and sieved as a masking layer under the icing. The icing is fondant or sifted confectioners' sugar let down with kirsch to a pouring consistency — thin enough to flood, thick enough to stay opaque.
Burnt almonds and angelica"Burnt almonds" are almonds cooked in caramel until browned, then chopped — praliné, not scorched nuts. Candied angelica is a specialty or mail-order item now; candied citron is easier to find, and chopped candied lemon peel stands in for the green if it must.
Mold and yieldAny deep 9 to 10 inch tube, springform or shaped pan filled three-quarters full will do if you have no hexagonal mold. The batter is a full four pounds and serves 16 to 20 as an entremets slice.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, longtime chef of Delmonico's, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working record of the restaurant's kitchen, which is why entries like this one are cross-referenced to numbered preparations for vanilla sugar, kirsch icing and peach marmalade rather than repeating them. The cake itself is a génoise — the whole-egg sponge traditionally associated with Genoa — dressed up under the name Favart; the Salle Favart in Paris was the home of the Opéra-Comique and took its name from Charles-Simon Favart, whose wife was the singer and actress Justine Favart, though whether the cake was named for them is not documented. The pairing of a peach glaze with kirsch icing and caramelised almonds is of its period, when a large cake for the entremets course was expected to arrive masked, iced and studded with candied fruit rather than plain.