No. 3318

Mars Cakes

Gateaux Mars

Roll out some foundation paste (No. 135) to an eighth of an inch in thickness; cut this into three-inch wide bands and cover these with a layer of almond cream (No. 40) mixed with as much vanilla pastry cream (No. 46); bake in a slow oven, and when done and cold mask over with a layer of meringue (No. 140), having it three-quarters of an inch thick; smooth the sides and tops well. Slit these bands across one inch and a quarter apart with the tip of a small knife and decorate each section with halved almonds or thin slices of almonds cut lengthwise and laid on symmetrically in imitation of branches, having a dry currant between each one. Cut the cakes where they have been slit, place them on a baking sheet, dredge with sugar and set into a slack oven to color the meringue; the bands may be left whole and divided where they were slit while yet hot.

← No. 3317 Marillan Cakes Small Cakes for Entremets No. 3319 Nougat of Apricots →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer wrote for a professional brigade with the numbered component recipes already at hand, so the work here is mostly in assembling four separate preparations. Nothing is difficult; the difficulty is sequence.

The cross-referenced partsFoundation paste (No. 135) is Ranhofer's lining paste, rolled thin here; the page does not say whether it is sweetened. Almond cream (No. 40) is a frangipane-type mixture of ground almonds, butter, sugar and egg; No. 46 is the vanilla pastry cream the recipe names; No. 140 is a meringue of whipped whites and sugar. Competent modern versions of these four should behave much the same way.
Oven temperaturesNeither term was a fixed value. Roughly, a slow oven is around 300-325F, and the final slack oven no hotter, the point of that second pass being to dry and faintly color the meringue rather than bake it. The two words were often used interchangeably in period cookbooks, so treating the second as cooler than the first is an inference, not something Ranhofer says.
The hinge: cool completely before maskingThe meringue goes onto cold bands. Spread on anything still warm and it weeps and slides off the filling, and no amount of smoothing will recover the flat sides Ranhofer wants.
Three-quarters of an inch of meringueThat is a substantial slab by modern standards. Use a stiff meringue that holds a clean edge under a palette knife; a soft, underwhipped one will slump before it reaches the oven.
Slitting, not cuttingScoring the meringue at 1¼-inch intervals before the final drying gives clean divisions later. The alternative given at the end -- bake the band whole, then cut through the score lines while still hot -- is the more reliable route, since cold meringue shatters.
Dry currantsThese are dried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. They are placed as berries between the almond "branches", purely decorative.
Dredge with sugarA light dusting of granulated or caster sugar before the low oven; it draws a thin crust and helps the surface take a pale color.
YieldThe recipe gives neither a length of band nor a number of cakes. As arithmetic only: slit at 1¼ inches, every 15 inches of band yields a dozen pieces. Scale by the length of pastry you roll.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this recipe sits in a long run of small cakes for entremets -- small sweet cakes sent out as part of the dessert service, made in quantity from a few base preparations kept ready in the pastry section. The name is unexplained in the book, as are most of Ranhofer's cake names; mars is both the god and the French word for March. What is more telling is the method: a band of paste, a baked cream filling, a masked meringue top, then division into portions. Building long bands and cutting them down may have suited a nineteenth-century pastry kitchen turning out several dozen identical small cakes, and the almond-branch-and-currant decoration is the kind of quick symmetrical piece of handwork a trained commis could repeat without a mold.