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Gateau Guadaloupe
Place four ounces sugar in a bowl with five egg yolks, the grated rind of half a lemon, then whisk to a creamy point. Beat whites of the five eggs to a stiff froth and gradually incorporate yolks, lightly mix with skimmer, then add three ounces pure rice flour, two ounces well-picked raisins and a half saltspoon salt. Lightly butter a straight-edged pie plate, line bottom with a buttered paper, then drop in preparation, smooth surface and set in oven to bake for twenty-five minutes. Remove, let stand for ten minutes, turn upon table, lift up paper, spread over three tablespoons orange marmalade, then sprinkle one ounce peeled and finely chopped pistachios. Beat up a gill cream to a stiff froth, add tablespoon each powdered sugar and rum, whisk for another minute, neatly spread cream over surface of cake, dress on a dish with folded napkin and serve.
A flourless rice-flour sponge finished as a cold dessert. The original gives no oven temperature and assumes a cook who knows how to fold, which is where the whole thing succeeds or fails.
- Fold, do not stirThere is no chemical leavening here — the five beaten whites are the only lift. Add the yolk mixture to the whites in three additions and cut through with a broad spatula (the "skimmer" of the original) until barely combined; the rice flour and raisins go in the same way. Overworking gives a flat, rubbery slab.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated. For a sponge of this size, 350F for the twenty-five minutes given is a reasonable modern default. Test with a skewer at 22 minutes.
- Rice flour"Pure rice flour" means plain white rice flour, not glutinous or sweet rice flour, which behaves completely differently. Finely milled is best; coarse rice flour reads as grit in a sponge.
- The panA "straight-edged pie plate" is a shallow round tin with vertical sides — an 8- or 9-inch cake pan is the right modern substitute. Butter it, line the base with parchment (the "buttered paper"), and butter that too.
- Small measuresA gill is half a cup, so the cream topping is 1/2 cup heavy cream. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, meaning an eighth of a teaspoon here.
- Pistachios"Peeled" means blanched and skinned. Cover shelled pistachios with boiling water for a minute and rub the skins off in a towel; the green is the point of the garnish.
- Raisins"Well-picked" refers to sorting out stems and grit, which packaged raisins no longer need. Toss them in a little of the rice flour so they do not sink through the loose batter.
- Assembly and yieldServes six to eight. The marmalade can go on while the cake is still slightly warm, but the rum cream should be whipped and spread within an hour of serving or it weeps into the sponge.
The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), assembled by a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, whose habit was to gather hundreds of short, dense formulas of this kind under place-names. Naming a cake for a locale was standard French pastry practice of the period, and one might read the components here as doing similar geographic work: rum, orange marmalade and pistachios can be taken to point at Guadeloupe as a French Caribbean sugar and rum island rather than at any documented local dish, though that reading is speculative.