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Gateau, Constantine
Place in a bowl four ounces fine sugar, adding five egg yolks, one teaspoon orange-flower water, two ounces finely chopped peeled pistachios, and briskly stir with a wooden spoon ten minutes. Beat up the whites of five eggs to a stiff froth and gradually add to yolks, with three ounces sifted flour and a saltspoon salt, gently mixing with the skimmer meanwhile. Lightly butter a small square pastry pan, line bottom with a sheet of paper, then drop in preparation, neatly smooth surface, and set in a moderate oven thirty minutes. Remove and let cool off, turn on a pastry grill with a pan underneath, and remove paper. Place three ounces glazed sugar in a saucepan with a tablespoon very strong-made coffee, the white of half an egg, and briskly stir on the fire while heating for three minutes. Remove, pour in a tablespoon good kirsch, mix well, then spread this glaze over the cake, let cool off, dress on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
This is a pistachio génoise with a coffee-kirsch glaze, written in the shorthand of a professional pastry kitchen around 1900. The weights matter more than usual here, since the whole structure depends on the ratio of egg to flour.
- Weights, not volumesFour ounces sugar is about 115 g (a scant 2/3 cup), three ounces flour about 85 g (2/3 cup, sifted), two ounces pistachios about 1/2 cup chopped. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon.
- "Glazed sugar"This means sucre glace, i.e. confectioners' or icing sugar. Three ounces is roughly 3/4 cup, unsifted.
- OvenA moderate oven is about 350F (175C). The recipe specifies only a "small square pastry pan"; thirty minutes suits a thin layer in a pan of roughly that size, and the cake is done when it springs back and the edges pull from the sides.
- The hinge: foldingThe ten minutes of beating yolks with sugar is what carries the cake, and the flour and whites go in together with almost no working. The "skimmer" is a flat perforated spoon; a rubber spatula does the same job. Overmixing at this stage gives a flat, tough cake, and there is no chemical leavening to rescue it.
- Orange-flower waterStrength varies a good deal between brands. A teaspoon is assertive but not wrong; taste yours first and use half if it is a concentrated one.
- Pistachios"Peeled" means blanched and skinned, which keeps the crumb green rather than brown-flecked. Chop them fine; large pieces sink.
- The glaze and its raw eggHalf an egg white beaten with icing sugar and coffee over heat for three minutes is a warm royal icing, and it will not reliably reach a pasteurizing temperature in a home pan. Use pasteurized egg white if the cake is for anyone vulnerable. The kirsch goes in off the fire so the alcohol is not driven off.
- Pastry grillA wire cooling rack over a sheet pan, so the glaze can run off the sides and be caught.
- Yield and serviceA square layer of this size cuts into roughly 8 to 12 pieces. The folded napkin under the cake was standard plating in this book's era; a rack-dried glaze needs no such help today.
The International Cook Book gathers dishes under place names in the manner of the late-19th-century French professional repertoire, where a gâteau, sauce or garnish was routinely tagged with a city to fix it in a chef's memory rather than to record an origin. Constantine is the inland Algerian city, French-administered from 1837, and the name here does real work: orange-flower water and pistachios are the signature flavourings of North African and Levantine pastry, grafted onto an entirely French génoise method. The coffee-and-kirsch glaze is pure Paris. Cakes of this type are often said to descend from the Italian-trained pastry cooks who standardized the whisked egg foam sponge in French kitchens, though the lineage is traditional rather than documented, and the technique here — beaten yolks, separately whipped whites, a small measure of flour folded in last — remained the backbone of hotel pastry work until chemical leavening and stand mixers changed the arithmetic.