No. 3353

Palais de Dames with Vanilla

Palais de Dames Vanilles

Work four ounces of butter to a cream in a vessel; add to it four ounces of sugar partly flavored with vanilla (No. 3165), then three whole eggs one by one and lastly four ounces of sifted flour. Dress this preparation by means of a pocket (Fig. 179) on a buttered and floured baking sheet and cook in a hot oven. After removing glaze over with a brush dipped in vanilla icing (No. 102).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A piped butter-and-egg batter baked as small flat cookies, then brushed with vanilla icing while still warm. Ranhofer assumes you have his vanilla sugar and vanilla icing formulas to hand, and gives no oven number, size or yield.

The weights, in cupsFour ounces butter is one stick (8 tablespoons); four ounces sugar is a generous 1/2 cup; four ounces sifted flour is about 1 cup lightly spooned. Weighing is better here, since the batter's spreading depends on the flour being right.
"A pocket"A pastry bag; Ranhofer refers the reader to Fig. 179. A plain round tip of about 1/2 inch is the modern equivalent. Pipe rounds the size of a quarter, well apart, as the batter spreads considerably.
"Hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; a hot oven is conventionally taken as somewhere around 400F. Small piped cakes of this kind bake in roughly 7-10 minutes and are done when the edges are brown and the centers still pale.
Vanilla sugarNo. 3165 is Ranhofer's vanilla-flavored sugar, not given here. Substitute a teaspoon of vanilla extract added with the eggs, or blitz a bean with the sugar.
The batter will look curdledThree whole eggs beaten into four ounces of creamed butter is more liquid than the fat can hold. Add them one at a time as directed and expect it to break slightly; the flour brings it back together.
The icingNo. 102 is Ranhofer's vanilla icing, given elsewhere in the book. Brush it on while the cakes are still warm from the sheet so it sets to a dry sheen rather than soaking in.
Baking sheetButtered and floured is the period method; parchment gives a more even bottom and makes lifting these thin, fragile cakes off the sheet far easier. Move them with a thin offset spatula while warm.
YieldThe recipe gives no yield; at quarter size expect perhaps three to four dozen. They soften within a day; store airtight, and re-crisp briefly in a low oven if needed.

A Little History

Palais de dames — "ladies' palates" — belongs to the large family of French petits fours secs, thin piped butter cookies related to the palets de dames that Continental pastry books often studded with currants and to the langue de chat, which uses a similar batter piped into fingers rather than rounds. The name is generally read as a compliment to the delicacy of the thing rather than a reference to any particular person. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working reference for professional kitchens, which is why the instructions here are so compressed and why they cross-reference other numbered formulas instead of repeating them: a pastry cook on staff already knew what vanilla sugar and vanilla icing were, and needed only to be told the proportions and the order of work.