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Biscuits au Café
Two ounces fine sugar, one and a half ounces sifted wheat flour, one whole egg, the yolks of three eggs, the whites of four eggs, half teaspoon vanilla essence, two tablespoons strong-made coffee and one ounce melted butter. Place the sugar in a basin, crack in the whole egg and add the yolks of the three eggs; briskly beat up while heating for ten minutes, or until thoroughly thickened. Beat up the four whites to a stiff froth in a copper basin and add to the first mixture; gently mix for one minute, then add the flour; briskly mix again for one minute, add the butter, vanilla and coffee. Mix well again, transfer the preparation into a pastry pan lightly buttered. Place in a moderate oven and bake for twenty minutes. Remove the pan, cut the cake into six equal pieces. Dredge a little powdered sugar over them and serve on a folded napkin.
OX TAIL, A L'ANGLAISE Cut into small square pieces half a fresh ox tail. Cut in the same way one medium red carrot, one small, sound turnip, one medium onion, one leek and two branches celery; place these in a saucepan with half ounce melted butter. Mix well with a wooden spoon while cooking rather briskly for ten minutes, or until they are of nice golden colour. Then add six tablespoons well-washed barley, two tablespoons Worcestershire sauce, one tablespoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and three quarts hot water or broth. Mix well again. If any clean beef bones at hand, add to the soup, then as soon as it comes to a boil shift the pan, so as to let gently simmer for one hour and a half, taking care to skim the fat from the surface of the soup while cooking. Add one gill tomato sauce, one gill demi-glace. Mix and boil again for ten minutes. Pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A French génoise in miniature: almost no flour, seven eggs' worth of structure between whole egg, yolks and whites, and coffee for flavour. The hinge is the warm egg foam — everything after it is damage control.
- The egg-and-sugar base"Briskly beat up while heating for ten minutes" means over a pan of hot (not boiling) water, to roughly 110–120F, until the mixture is pale and holds a ribbon. A stand mixer will get there faster; take the bowl off the heat once warm and keep whipping until it cools to room temperature, or the foam will slacken.
- Weights, not cupsTwo ounces sugar is a scant 1/3 cup; one and a half ounces sifted flour is about 1/3 cup, lightly spooned. These are small amounts where a heavy hand ruins the ratio — use a scale.
- Copper basinCopper ions react with egg-white protein and help stabilise the foam, which may be why a copper basin is called for here. Any clean, grease-free bowl works; a pinch of cream of tartar gives a similar stabilising effect by a different, acidic route.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; 'moderate' is usually read as somewhere around 350F. Twenty minutes suits a shallow sheet or square pan roughly 8 inches across, with the batter no deeper than about 3/4 inch. It is done when the top springs back and the edges just pull from the pan.
- Folding orderWhites first, then flour, then the butter-vanilla-coffee. Melted butter and liquid coffee are both foam-killers, so add them last, stir in a spoonful of the batter to loosen them, and fold in three or four strokes rather than "briskly mixing."
- The coffeeTwo tablespoons of 'strong-made coffee' suggests something much stronger than ordinary drip coffee, which will read as damp rather than flavoured. Cool it before it meets the batter.
- Pastry pan and yieldLine the buttered pan with parchment; a lean sponge like this tears when turned out. Cut into six pieces as directed, dust with confectioners' sugar, and serve the day it is baked — sponges of this kind stale quickly.
"Biscuit" in French pastry does not mean a cookie or an American quick bread; it means a whipped-egg sponge, the family that includes biscuit de Savoie and the génoise, the word itself carrying an older twice-cooked etymology. Recipes of this kind allowed a batter built entirely on warmed egg foam to be flavoured a dozen ways — chocolate, lemon, liqueur, or here coffee — from a single formula, and turned out in a shallow pan to be cut into portions rather than served as a tall cake. The direction to send the pieces up dredged with sugar on a folded napkin is a straight lift from restaurant service of the period, a convention often said to have kept the pastry from sweating on the plate.