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Gateau, Germaine
Lightly butter a deep pie plate, and line it with thin layer puff paste. Neatly trim all around the edges, line the inside of the plate with a sheet of paper, then fill up with dried beans, set in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove, take up the beans and paper.
Peel and skin three sound, juicy oranges, divide in sections, and place them in a bowl, add two ounces glazed sugar and two tablespoons curacao, mix well, and arrange them on a plate. Spread three tablespoons currant jelly over them. Place two egg yolks in a bowl, add two gills cream, two tablespoons sugar and six drops vanilla essence, and briskly beat up with a whisk two minutes. Sprinkle a little powdered sugar over, then set in the oven twenty minutes. Remove, let rest ten minutes. Lift it up from the plate, dress on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A blind-baked puff pastry shell filled with macerated orange sections, currant jelly and a thin baked cream custard. The written method leaves out a step or two, and the vocabulary is French-hotel shorthand.
- The missing instructionThe recipe never says to pour the cream mixture over the fruit, but that is plainly what happens: the yolks, cream, sugar and vanilla go over the jelly-covered oranges in the baked shell before the second trip to the oven. "Arrange them on a plate" means the pastry-lined pie plate, not a serving dish.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of cream is one cup (240 ml). With only two yolks to a cup of cream this is a very loose custard; expect a soft, barely-set filling rather than a sliceable tart, and bake it in the plate you intend to unmould from with care.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives no temperature, only two twenty-minute stages. Modern practice would suggest something like 400-425F for the blind bake, dropping to 325-350F for the custard stage, since a cream that thin will curdle and the pastry edges scorch if the heat is left high for the full twenty minutes.
- Glazed sugarUsually taken to mean a fine powdered sugar, close to what a supermarket sells as confectioners' or icing sugar, though note that the recipe elsewhere writes plain 'sugar' and 'powdered sugar' as separate things, so the distinction is not certain. Two ounces would be roughly half a cup of icing sugar.
- CuracaoAn orange liqueur, then as now; Grand Marnier or triple sec stands in without complaint. Two tablespoons over three oranges is a light maceration, not a soaking, and the recipe sets no standing time: mix and arrange.
- The oranges"Peel and skin" means to supreme them: cut away peel and pith, then free each section from its membrane. Drain the sections well before they go into the shell or the released juice will thin the custard and soften the base.
- Blind bakingBaking paper and dried beans work exactly as described. Twenty minutes at 400F sets the walls; if the base is still pale, give it five minutes more uncovered before the filling goes in.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe says only 'a deep pie plate'; a 9-inch one would give about six portions from three oranges and a cup of cream. The folded napkin is standard period restaurant service, and is generally explained as absorbing steam and stopping a warm pastry sliding on the platter.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), a compendium written by a Delmonico's man who catalogued dishes by the hundred and named a great many of them after women, patrons and colleagues. Gateau Germaine follows that habit; the personal name carries no fixed formula, and the identity behind it is not recorded here or, generally, anywhere. What is fixed is the construction, a blind-baked puff shell, fruit set in liqueur and jelly, and a thin cream custard finished in the oven, which is standard French pastry practice of the period reduced to a single paragraph for cooks who already knew the moves. The curaçao and the folded napkin both mark it as restaurant work rather than household baking.