No. 3357

Shavings

Copeaux

Partly beat up ten egg-whites; add three-quarters of a pound of sugar, three tablespoonfuls of orange flower water, and three-quarters of a pound of flour; lay this paste through a pocket furnished with an eighth-inch diameter socket or else through a paper cornet, on a waxed baking sheet in the shape of ribbons, each four and a half inches long; bake in a brisk oven, and as soon as done detach from the sheet and roll them spirally around small rollers three-eighths of an inch in diameter, removing them as fast as they get the proper shape.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's copeaux are thin ribbon wafers piped, baked and curled while hot — closer to a French cigarette cookie than to anything in a modern tea-cake chapter. The batter is simple; the whole difficulty is in the shaping window.

The hinge: work in small batchesThe ribbons stay pliable only briefly once off the oven. Pipe six or eight per sheet, not twenty, and have the rollers laid out before the sheet goes in. Anything that stiffens can be returned to the oven for a few seconds to soften again.
Weights, convertedThree-quarters of a pound of sugar is about 340 g (1 2/3 cups granulated); three-quarters of a pound of flour is also 340 g, which is roughly 2 3/4 cups scooped and levelled. Weigh it if you can — the flour-to-white ratio decides whether the ribbons spread or hold.
"Partly beat up" the whitesThis means frothy and broken up, not soft peaks and certainly not stiff. Over-beaten whites give a meringue that puffs and cracks instead of a flat ribbon that curls.
Orange flower waterStill sold, and still potent. Three tablespoonfuls in this quantity is assertive by modern taste; a tablespoon or two reads as perfumed rather than medicinal. Buy the distilled water for food use, not a cosmetic toilet water.
"A waxed baking sheet"A sheet rubbed with beeswax or plain wax, the period's non-stick surface. Use parchment or a silicone mat, and note that the batter should be piped onto a cool sheet — a hot pan sets the edges before the ribbon settles.
Oven temperatureA brisk oven is generally taken as somewhere around 400-425F. These are thin enough to bake in only a few minutes: done when the edges have taken a light brown and the centre is still pale. Watch them closely, as they colour very fast.
The piping equipmentA "pocket furnished with an eighth-inch socket" is a pastry bag with a plain round tip about 3 mm across, or a rolled paper cone with the point snipped. Pipe strips 4 1/2 inches long, well apart, since they spread.
The rollersThree-eighths of an inch is about the thickness of a slim wooden dowel, a little stouter than a pencil. Roll the hot ribbon spirally around it, slide it off as soon as it holds shape, and reuse the roller immediately.
Yield and keepingTen whites with this much sugar and flour makes a very large quantity. They soften within hours in humid air, so store airtight the moment they are cool and re-crisp briefly in a low oven if needed.

A Little History

Copeaux is simply French for wood shavings or curls, the name describing the finished form rather than any ingredient — the same logic that gives us cigarettes russes and tuiles (tiles). Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a full record of the French professional repertoire as it was practised in an American restaurant kitchen, which is why a fiddly petit four sits in a chapter alongside plain Scotch bread and sugar cakes. Wafers of this type belong to the pastry cook's stock of petits fours secs: cheap in materials, expensive in labour, and valued precisely because a kitchen with a brigade could turn out hundreds while a household cook could not. The orange flower water points to the older French confectionery tradition, where distilled floral waters did the flavouring work that vanilla extract largely took over during the twentieth century.