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Gateau, Emma
Peel four juicy mandarins, remove silky skins as well as seeds, place in bowl with a tablespoon powdered sugar and two tablespoons curacoa, gently turn in seasoning and let infuse until required. Peel three sound sweet pears, cut in halves, remove seeds, then cut in slices; place in a bowl with a tablespoon sugar and two tablespoons Swiss kirsch, mix well and keep till required. Line the interior of a lightly buttered pie plate with a thin layer of feuilletage, then with pastry pincers pinch the edges of pie all around. Spread two tablespoons raspberry marmalade at bottom of plate, then neatly arrange mandarins and pears alternately all around at bottom and set in oven to bake for twenty-five minutes. Remove, beat whites of three eggs to a stiff froth, add tablespoon sugar and six drops vanilla essence, mix well, then spread preparation over fruit. Sprinkle over one ounce finely chopped, peeled almonds and one tablespoon powdered sugar, reset in oven for ten minutes, remove, dress cake on a dish with folded napkin and serve either hot or cold.
A puff-pastry fruit tart under a meringue lid, from a book that gives no oven temperature and assumes a cook who already knows one. The menu text that follows the recipe belongs to the book's day-by-day Thanksgiving plan, not to the cake.
- FeuilletageThis is puff pastry, rolled thin. A sheet of all-butter frozen puff, thawed, fits a 9-inch pie plate; dock the base with a fork so it does not dome under the fruit.
- Oven heatNone is given. Puff pastry with wet fruit on it wants 400F for the first 25 minutes so the layers set before the juices soak in; drop to 350F for the ten-minute meringue bake so the almonds colour rather than scorch.
- Powdered sugarIn 1906 usage this is finely granulated sugar, closer to today's caster sugar than to confectioners' sugar. Caster dissolves properly into the egg whites; confectioners' sugar carries cornstarch and will dull the meringue.
- Raspberry marmaladeA thick raspberry preserve; period 'marmalade' meant a stiff fruit paste, though nothing in the recipe says whether it was seedless. Any good raspberry jam works, and it is worth using sparingly — a thin film is a moisture barrier, a thick layer boils up through the fruit.
- The liqueursCuraçao is a bitter-orange liqueur; Swiss kirsch is clear cherry brandy, not a sweetened cherry cordial. Both are here as flavour, and both leave liquid behind — lift the fruit out of its macerating syrup with a slotted spoon before arranging it, or the pastry base will never crisp.
- Mandarin segments"Remove silky skins" means peeling the membrane off each segment, which is tedious but is the difference between a clean fruit tart and a chewy one. Well-drained canned mandarin segments are already membrane-free and are a defensible substitute.
- Vanilla essenceSix drops is a very small quantity, well under an eighth of a teaspoon of modern extract. Period essences varied in strength, so add cautiously; much more reads as artificial against the kirsch and curaçao.
- MeringueThree whites with a single tablespoon of sugar is a very lean, soft meringue — it browns fast and weeps if it sits. Spread it right to the pastry edge so it anchors, and serve within a couple of hours.
- YieldThe recipe gives no plate size or serving count; a pie plate of this sort would serve perhaps six. The 'folded napkin' is service on a flat dish with a napkin beneath the cake, a standard restaurant presentation of the era.
The International Cook Book was assembled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is organised around a menu for every day of the year with numbered recipes to match — which is why this gateau is followed straight into a Thanksgiving breakfast, luncheon and dinner. Naming a dish for a person or a place — Emma, Mrs. Ludlow — was common in American hotel and restaurant cookery of the period, a way of distinguishing one variation on a familiar form from the next without a lengthy description on the card. The form itself is French: a puff-pastry base, a jam seal, fruit macerated in liqueur, and a meringue finish browned in the oven, the same construction that underlies the nineteenth-century tarte meringuée. The fruit is suggestive — mandarins and pears together on a New York table in late November imply a market supplied by rail and steamer, and a kitchen with kirsch and curaçao within reach.