No. 3313

Lafayette with Rum

Lafayette au Rhum

Pound six ounces of almonds with six ounces of sugar to reduce to a powder, then sift it through a sieve; place this powder in a basin with six eggs and beat till light, then add one tablespoonful of rum, an ounce of flour and four ounces of melted butter. Pour the preparation into tartlet molds lined with puff paste parings (No. 146), strew the tops with sugar and bake in a hot oven. Cover the tops with a thin layer of icing flavored with rum (No. 102).

← No. 3312 Rolled Jelly Biscuit Small Cakes for Entremets No. 3314 Madeleines and Genoese Madeleines →

For the Modern Kitchen

A rum-scented almond batter, closer to a frangipane than a cake, baked in pastry-lined tartlet molds. The whole thing hangs on beating the eggs and almond-sugar to a genuine ribbon, since one ounce of flour gives almost no structure.

Weights, in modern termsSix ounces of almonds is roughly 1½ to 1¾ cups of almond flour; six ounces of sugar is a scant cup. The single ounce of flour is roughly 3½ tablespoons, and four ounces of butter is one stick.
Pounding the almondsBlanched almonds ground with the sugar in a food processor reproduce the mortar work; the sugar keeps the nuts from turning to paste. Pulse rather than run the machine, then sift and re-grind whatever stays in the sieve.
The beating is the recipeSix whole eggs with almond powder and sugar need long, warm beating — five to eight minutes in a stand mixer, until the mixture falls in a thick ribbon. There is no chemical leavening here and barely any flour, so all the lift comes from this stage.
Melted butter, cooledAdd the butter last and off the heat of the pan, warm but not hot, folding it in a third at a time. Poured in hot or all at once it deflates the foam and sinks to the bottom of the molds.
Puff paste paringsNo. 146 is Ranhofer's puff pastry; the parings are the trimmings, stacked flat rather than balled up and re-rolled so the layers stay in line. A sheet of good all-butter puff pastry does the same job — line the molds thin, since the filling swells.
"A hot oven"Period usage puts a hot oven somewhere around 400-425F. For tartlet-sized molds, 400-425F for 12 to 18 minutes is right: the pastry needs the heat, but the almond filling colors quickly under its dusting of sugar.
The rum icingNo. 102 is the book's icing; the recipe wants it thin and flavored with rum. Spread it on the cakes while they are still slightly warm and let it set; a thick layer will slide off the domed tops.
YieldThe batter fills roughly eighteen to twenty-four 2-inch tartlet molds, depending on how full they are taken. They are best the day they are made, before the pastry softens under the icing.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summary of his years cooking at Delmonico's in New York — a tenure usually described as spanning more than three decades — and its "Small Cakes for Entremets" chapter is essentially a French pastry repertoire transplanted whole. Dishes named for Lafayette appear in nineteenth-century American kitchens — the Marquis de Lafayette's triumphal tour of the United States in 1824-25 attached his name to streets, counties, gingerbread, and any number of confections, and cooks seem to have gone on using it long after the visit, apparently as a general mark of Franco-American compliment, though the practice is more often assumed than documented. The cake itself is a rum-flavored variant of the almond-and-egg batters that fill French tartlets under names like amandines or conversations, and the instruction to line the molds with puff paste parings is a professional economy: a busy pastry department generated trimmings all day, and small cakes were where they went.