No. 3359

Trouvere Cakes

Gateaux Trouvere

Lay a pound of flour in a circle on the table and in the center place half a pound of butter, half a pound of sugar, the peel of one orange and two eggs, also a half-inch ball of carbonate of ammonia, having it finely crushed; mix the whole carefully to obtain a smooth and fine paste, watching attentively that it does not crumble; let it rest for half an hour, then roll it to three sixteenths of an inch in thickness; cut it into inch and a half diameter rounds with a channeled pastry cutter, range them on a baking sheet, egg over, and trace lines on top with a fork; prick the surfaces and bake in a hot oven.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A plain French-style tea biscuit from Ranhofer's Delmonico repertoire, leavened with baker's ammonia rather than baking powder. Two things need translating: the leavener and the oven.

Carbonate of ammoniaThis is baker's ammonia (ammonium carbonate, also sold as hartshorn), still made for European-style thin biscuits. It gasses off completely in a thin, dry cookie and leaves a crisper snap than baking powder; it must not be used in anything thick or moist, where the ammonia smell stays trapped.
The "half-inch ball"An honestly ambiguous measure: a half-inch lump broken from the solid cake in which the leavener was then sold. Crushed, that is somewhere between a half and a full teaspoon for a pound of flour. If you have no baker's ammonia, a teaspoon of baking powder gives a softer, less brittle cookie.
Do not taste the raw doughAmmonium carbonate is sharply alkaline and smells strongly of ammonia in the bowl. That is normal and it bakes out; it is still unpleasant raw.
A hot oven400 to 425F. These are small and thin, so figure 8 to 10 minutes — pale gold at the edges. They should dry out rather than brown.
Orange peelGrated zest only, no white pith, from one orange. Rubbing the zest into the sugar releases the oil and flavors the batch more evenly.
Mixing on the tableThe flour ring with the fats and eggs in the middle is the classic well (fontaine) method: work the center to a paste, then draw the flour in. "Watching that it does not crumble" means keep it together as a single mass -- do not cut it in like pastry. Half an hour's rest at cool room temperature relaxes it enough to roll.
Thickness and cuttingThree-sixteenths of an inch is about 5 mm, thin but not wafer-thin. A fluted (channeled) cutter of 1 1/2 inches; the fork lines and pricking are both decorative and practical, since docking keeps them flat.
YieldA pound of flour at this size gives a great many biscuits, well over ten dozen at an inch and a half across. They keep well in a tin, helped by the dryness the ammonia leavening gives.

A Little History

The recipe comes from The Epicurean (1894), Charles Ranhofer's enormous compendium of the cooking he did over some three decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the tea-cake chapter is essentially a French pastry cook's biscuit list transplanted to Manhattan. The name looks decorative rather than descriptive: a trouvère was one of the verse-singers of the medieval French north. What is genuinely informative here is the leavener. Ammonium carbonate, long known as hartshorn from its earlier preparation by distilling deer antler, was widely used for thin crisp biscuits in European bakeshops before chemical baking powders became reliable, and it survived in professional use precisely because it gives a dryness and snap that powder does not. The instruction to crush it implies it was on hand as a solid lump rather than a powder, which is why he measures it as a ball rather than by spoon or weight.