No. 3345

Crumbled Paste Cakes

Gateaux en Pate Fondante

Mix slowly with the hands twelve ounces of butter and a pound of flour in such a way as to have it crumbling like semolina, then lay it on a table in the shape of a ring and in the center place twelve ounces of sugar, six egg-yolks, three eggs, some grated lemon peel and a grain of salt. Mingle the whole simply with the blade of a knife and incorporate this liquid into the crumbled flour; work together quickly and roll it into a ball; wrap up in a cloth and leave stand for two hours in a very cool place. Lay the paste on a floured table and divide it into small parts; roll out each of these pieces into strings four and one-half inches long; curl both extremities of each string in two spirals, bring these spirals together so as to form a sort of eye-glass imitation, arrange them gradually on a baking-sheet and let them dry for two hours. Then bake in a slack oven.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A rich egg-and-butter cookie dough, rubbed rather than creamed, then piped-by-hand into little spectacle shapes. Nothing here is difficult, but the two rests and the low oven are what keep the shape.

Slack oven"Slack" is the coolest working range of a range oven; period usage is loose, but it is usually read as somewhere around 275-325F. These cakes are meant to dry and set pale rather than colour, so a hotter oven risks browning and spreading them before the interior sets.
The hinge: two rests, not oneTwo hours chilled for the dough and two hours of air-drying for the shaped pieces are both structural. The chill firms the butter so the strings roll cleanly; the drying skins the surface so the spirals hold their curl instead of slumping into a blob in the oven.
"Crumbling like semolina"Rub the 12 oz butter into the 1 lb flour only until the mixture looks like coarse dry sand or fine breadcrumbs. Cold butter and a light hand; if it warms into a paste, the finished cake is heavy.
Weights, not cupsThe proportions are given by weight and should stay that way: 1 lb (450 g) flour, 12 oz (340 g) butter, 12 oz (340 g) sugar. Volume measures for flour will throw the ratio off badly in a dough this rich.
The eggsSix yolks plus three whole eggs, as written. If the dough is slack after mixing, hold back part of the last whole egg.
Mixing with a knife bladeThe sugar, eggs, lemon zest and salt are cut together in the well and then chopped into the crumb with a knife rather than kneaded. This limits gluten development and keeps the texture short. Work it into a ball quickly and stop.
ShapingRoll each piece into a rope about 4.5 inches long and pencil-thick, then coil each end inward in opposite directions and press the two coils together, so the finished cake looks like a pair of spectacles. Keep the ropes even or the thin spots will scorch.
Yield and keepingThe batch is large by modern standards: a pound of flour with butter, sugar and nine eggs' worth of enrichment will make several dozen small cakes. They are dry tea cakes and should keep for some time in a tin.

A Little History

This is from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he wrote during some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it sits in a long run of numbered tea cakes intended for the pastry side of a large hotel kitchen. Pâte fondante here means simply a paste that melts in the mouth -- the high butter and sugar against a single pound of flour is the definition of a short, sandy French biscuit rather than a chewy cookie. The eyeglass shape belongs to a family of coiled petits fours secs, and it is the sort of thing that turned up on an American tea table in the late nineteenth century, when Delmonico's set the standard for what fashionable New York expected on a plate. Ranhofer's terseness is characteristic: the book assumes a reader who already knows what a slack oven feels like and needs only the proportions and the shape.