Home › The World's Kitchen › Eugenies
Eugenies
Plunge in boiling water three ounces almonds for three minutes; drain, shell and place in a mortar with a tablespoon cold water and two ounces sugar and pound to a fine paste. Add another ounce of sugar, with an egg, mix with a wooden spoon, add another egg, mix for two minutes, then add the yolk of another egg; mix again. Add one and a half ounces flour, a half saltspoon salt and a tablespoon curacao. Mix well for five minutes. Fill six lightly buttered tartlet moulds with the preparation, lay them on a tin, set to bake in oven for fifteen minutes. Remove, unmould on a dish, dredge a little vanilla sugar over and serve.
A small almond-paste tartlet, essentially a financier batter made from scratch in a mortar rather than from ground almonds out of a bag. The mixing is deliberate and the order matters.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the recipe says only "set to bake in oven," and no mould size is specified either. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading for fifteen minutes in shallow tartlet moulds; the tops should be set and lightly coloured at the edges.
- Blanching the almondsThree minutes in boiling water loosens the skins, and "shell" here means slip off those brown skins, not crack a nut. Do it while they are still warm and dry them well before pounding, or the paste turns slack.
- Weights in cups3 oz whole almonds is roughly 2/3 cup; 3 oz sugar in total (2 oz then 1 oz) is about 6 to 7 tablespoons; 1 1/2 oz flour is roughly 1/3 cup. Weighing is safer than measuring here, since the ratio of almond to flour is what gives the crumb.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. It was a real piece of Victorian flatware, the smallest spoon in the set.
- Mortar versus food processorA processor will do the work, but pulse rather than run it, and keep the tablespoon of cold water and the sugar in from the start as the recipe says. Both stop the almonds heating and releasing oil, which is what turns the paste greasy instead of fine.
- Why the long mixingTwo minutes after the second egg, five minutes at the end. There is no chemical leavening in the recipe at all, so the prolonged beating with a wooden spoon is presumably what lightens and emulsifies the batter.
- CuraçaoAn orange liqueur. Any dry orange liqueur, or Grand Marnier, gives the same effect. A tablespoon in six small cakes is flavour rather than alcohol.
- Vanilla sugarCaster sugar stored a week or two with a split vanilla pod. Commercial vanilla sugar works, or blitz a pinch of seeds into granulated sugar.
- YieldSix tartlets, one modest serving each. They unmould best after two or three minutes' rest, warm but no longer fragile.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) is a large alphabetically arranged compendium, and it is thick with little pastries named after people, most of them French and most of them from the previous fifty years. "Eugenies" is generally taken to honour the Empress Eugénie, the Spanish-born wife of Napoleon III, whose name attached itself to a great many dishes, garnishes and cakes during and after the Second Empire; such namings were rarely documented and almost never authorised. The cake itself belongs to the family of pounded-almond batters that runs through nineteenth-century French pastry and ends up, in the modern kitchen, as the financier. What dates this version is the mortar: the three minutes in boiling water, the cold water in the mortar and the sugar added in two stages are all technique for keeping the nuts from turning to oil under the pestle.