Home › The World's Kitchen › Cream Cake
Cream Cake
Sift one pound flour on a table, make a small fountain in the centre, pour in half pint of double cream with half teaspoon salt and two ounces sugar, then gradually incorporate flour with the cream; knead well for five minutes, place the paste on a cold plate and keep in a cool place for thirty minutes. Wash well in ice water a quarter pound butter; remove and squeeze out all water from it, roll out the paste on a lightly floured table to half inch in thickness, spread the butter in the centre of the paste; fold up the four corners of paste to meet right in the centre, so as to entirely cover the butter, place it on a tin and keep in the ice box for ten minutes. Roll it out again to a square form half inch in thickness, wet one-half the surface with ice water, fold in two and place in the ice box for ten minutes; roll it out same way, and fold up as before; repeat the exact operation three times more. Give a square form half inch in thickness, egg the surface and borders, sprinkle two ounces granulated sugar on top, place on a lightly wetted pastry pan and bake in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove and serve.
This is laminated pastry rather than cake in any modern sense: a cream-enriched dough folded around butter and turned repeatedly, then baked flat and sugared. The original gives no oven temperature, so that is the first gap to fill.
- Oven heatNo temperature is stated. Laminated pastry of this kind wants a hot oven, 400-425F, so the water in the butter layers flashes to steam before the fat melts out. Thirty minutes at that heat suits a half-inch sheet.
- MeasuresOne pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups; half a pint of double cream is one cup. Double cream is British-style heavy cream at roughly 48 percent fat — American heavy cream (36 percent) works, though the dough will be marginally slacker.
- Washing the butterKneading butter under ice water removed buttermilk and salt from nineteenth-century farm butter, which spoiled and browned unevenly. With modern unsalted butter it is unnecessary; just work it to a pliable slab at about 60F, cool but not brittle.
- The hinge: butter and dough at the same firmnessEverything here depends on the butter block and the dough being equally cool and equally plastic. Too cold and the butter shatters into shards; too warm and it merges into the dough and you get shortcrust, not leaves. The ten-minute chills between turns are the point of the recipe, not padding.
- The turnsThe four-corner envelope is the lock-in. What follows is a simple fold in two, repeated until you have five in all. The instruction to wet half the surface with ice water before folding helps the layers seal; a light brush is enough, standing water makes the dough gummy.
- "Egg the surface"Beat one egg with a pinch of salt and brush it on. Keep it off the cut edges: egg wash that runs down the sides glues the layers together and the pastry rises lopsided.
- The pan"Lightly wetted pastry pan" means a baking sheet rinsed with water and not dried — the steam helps the lift and, before nonstick surfaces were common, kept the base from catching.
- Yield and servingCut the baked sheet into squares or fingers while warm, since cold puff pastry shatters under the knife. Serves eight to ten, and it is at its best within a few hours of baking.
The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), and it shows the habits of a chef trained in the French professional tradition — Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York. What is called a "cream cake" here is essentially a fine puff paste in which cream replaces the water in the détrempe. The instruction to wash the butter in ice water is the period detail that dates the page most clearly: before creamery standardisation butter often arrived salted and carrying residual buttermilk, and washing it under cold water gave a cleaner, more uniform fat. The sugar is scattered on top before baking rather than glazed on after, so it caramelises in the oven's heat into a thin crackling crust.