No. 3297

Conde Cakes

Gateaux Conde

Mix in a vessel four or five spoonfuls of chopped almonds with an equal quantity of powdered sugar; wet slowly with egg-whites so as to obtain a thin but not too flowing paste. Roll out some fragments of puff paste (No. 146) into long strips, three and a half inches wide; cover the tops with the almond preparation and cut the sides straight, then cut them across in one-inch wide pieces; take them up one at a time on the blade of a palette knife and range in straight rows on a baking sheet, slightly apart from each other. Besprinkle the cakes with fine sugar and cook in a slack oven; remove when nicely done by passing a knife under to detach from the pan.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A trimmings recipe: puff pastry offcuts spread with a raw almond-and-egg-white glaze, cut into fingers, and dried more than baked. Two things decide the outcome — the consistency of the almond paste and a genuinely low oven.

The hinge: a slack oven"Slack" means a cool oven, in the region of 300F or below. The almond glaze sets and dries at that temperature while the puff underneath rises slowly; in a hot oven the topping is liable to brown and crack before the pastry has lifted. Allow longer than you would give plain puff.
SpoonfulsRanhofer's "spoonful" is generally taken as a tablespoon. Four or five tablespoons of chopped almonds with the same volume of powdered sugar makes a small batch of topping, as befits a use for scraps.
Powdered sugarIn 1894 this means sugar ground fine, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Either works here. The "fine sugar" sprinkled on top before baking is a fine-grained sugar.
Consistency of the almond pasteAdd egg white a teaspoon at a time. You want a paste that spreads with a palette knife and holds its edge — thin enough to level, thick enough not to run off the strip and glue the cakes to the pan.
Puff paste No. 146That is Ranhofer's puff pastry. All-butter commercial puff is a fair substitute. The recipe assumes you are using the leftover trimmings from another job, so it is worth rolling scraps flat and layered rather than kneading them into a ball, which destroys the lamination.
Chopped, not groundThe almonds are chopped so the topping stays granular. Ground almonds give a smooth macaroon-like layer, which is a different and softer cake.
Cutting and movingCut with a firm downward press of a long knife rather than a sawing stroke, so the layers stay open at the cut edge. A small offset spatula does the work of the palette knife; range the fingers slightly apart, as the recipe directs.
Yield and keepingThey are best the day they are made and go leathery in a sealed tin; store loosely covered.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some three decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the entremets chapters are essentially a working list of the small dry cakes a large kitchen kept on hand to fill out a dessert service. Names like Condé attach themselves to almond preparations across nineteenth-century French pastry — the icing of ground almond, sugar and egg white is generally called glace à la Condé, and it appears on tarts, fingers and rissoles alike; the association with the princely house of Condé is traditional rather than documented. What the recipe really records is professional thrift. A restaurant that turned out vol-au-vents and bouchées daily accumulated puff pastry trimmings faster than it could use them, and a topping of almond and sugar turned that waste into a saleable petit four. Ranhofer gives it barely five lines because he assumed his reader already had the scraps on the bench.