No. 3312

Rolled Jelly Biscuit

Biscuit Roule a la Gelee

To make this cake use lady finger preparation (No. 3377), adding a little melted butter; as soon as this is mixed in pour the whole on a paper-covered baking sheet and spread it to a quarter of an inch thick layer, then bake in a hot oven; remove when done, detach from the paper and cover the surface of the cake with a layer of currant jelly (No. 3670), then roll it over on itself to form a roll; wrap this up in paper and leave to cool. When thoroughly cold undo the paper and stand the cake on a wire grate; ice it over with vanilla icing (No. 102). After this becomes very dry cut the cake into cross-wise slices, each one three-eighths of an inch thick. The rolled biscuit may also be covered with a layer of Conde almond preparation (No. 2), marking it in the places where the cake is to be sliced. Set the roll in the oven for an instant to color, then cut the cake in the marked places.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A thin sponge sheet, jellied, rolled and iced — the ancestor of every jelly roll. Ranhofer writes for a kitchen where four other numbered recipes are already at hand, so the cross-references are where most of the work hides.

Roll it warmThis is the hinge. The sponge must be turned out, spread and rolled while still hot or barely warm; a cooled sheet of eggy sponge cracks along the outside of the curve. Wrapping the finished roll in paper while it cools sets the spiral and keeps the surface from drying.
"Lady finger preparation"No. 3377 is a whipped-egg biscuit batter — yolks beaten with sugar, whites whipped separately, flour folded in — not a butter cake. The "little melted butter" added here makes it supple enough to bend. Any modern biscuit or sponge-roll batter using about 4 eggs, 1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 cup flour behaves the same way.
A hot ovenRanhofer gives no temperature, only 'hot'. For a quarter-inch sheet that is somewhere around 400-425F, and watch it: five to seven minutes. It is done when the surface springs back and the edges just begin to shrink from the paper. Overbaked sponge will not roll.
Paper-covered baking sheetParchment does what his greased paper did, and releases more reliably. A jelly-roll pan suits the quantity above; on a full half-sheet (13 by 18 inches) that amount of batter spreads thinner than a quarter of an inch.
Currant jellyNo. 3670 is a plain currant jelly. Warm it and stir smooth before spreading — cold set jelly tears the sponge. A thin, even layer only; a thick one squeezes out as you roll and loosens the spiral.
Vanilla icingNo. 102 is a poured sugar icing rather than a buttercream, thinned to coating consistency and flavored with vanilla. Confectioners' sugar, a little water and vanilla gives a similar dry, sliceable shell. "Very dry" means genuinely set -- several hours -- or the knife drags the icing into the crumb.
The almond variantNo. 2, the Condé almond preparation, is a paste of ground almonds, sugar and egg white, spread on and briefly flashed in a hot oven to color. Score the slice lines before it goes in; the crust shatters if you mark it after.
Yield and serviceCut crosswise at 3/8 inch, a sheet-sized roll gives several dozen slices, the count depending on which way it was rolled. These are entremets cakes -- small, iced, served in quantity on a platter alongside other small cakes rather than as a single sliced dessert.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put The Epicurean together in 1894 after some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its structure shows the kitchen it came from: nothing is repeated, everything is a number pointing somewhere else in the book. The rolled jelly cake itself is older than the book -- thin sponge sheets rolled around jam appear in English and American cookery through the middle of the nineteenth century, and the form later became fixed in British usage as the Swiss roll, a name with no established Swiss source. What is characteristic of Ranhofer is the finishing: instead of dusting the roll with sugar and sending it out whole, he ices it hard, lets it dry, and slices it into rounds so that each piece is a small individual cake fit for the entremets service.