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Gateaux, Jeanne
Beat up in a copper basin to a stiff froth the whites of five eggs, add four ounces fine sugar, mix a little with a skimmer, then add half pint whipped cream, four ounces sifted flour and two tablespoons curacao. Mix well with the skimmer. Drop preparation in a lightly buttered and floured pastry tin, eight inches square and one and a half inches high. Set in oven to bake twenty minutes. Remove, let cool off, turn on a table and cut cake into quarter-inch-thick slices. Prepare a cream frangipane and spread it on both sides of the sliced pieces, then stick the cakes one against another, so as to have them of the original form. Spread a glace au chocolate over the cakes, let cool off, dress on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A meringue-based sponge, sliced into layers, filled with almond pastry cream and coated in chocolate. The original assumes you already know what a frangipane and a glace au chocolat are, which is the main obstacle.
- The hinge: keep the whites stiffEverything after the meringue is folding, not stirring. The flour, cream and curacao go in with a skimmer (a wide, flat perforated spoon) precisely because it lifts rather than beats; a whisk or a mixer at this stage will collapse the batter and give you a flat, rubbery slab.
- Copper basinUnlined copper reacts with the whites and gives a more stable foam. A stainless or glass bowl works, and a pinch of cream of tartar does much the same job. Avoid plastic, which holds grease.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the original offers no descriptive term either. A modern cook baking a batter this deep for twenty minutes would land somewhere around a moderate oven, roughly 350F, but that is a reconstruction, not the book's instruction. The cake is done when it springs back and has just begun to pull from the sides.
- The tinAn 8-inch square pan at least 1.5 inches deep. Butter and flour it well and line the base; this batter has no chemical leavening and nothing to spare if it sticks.
- Cream frangipaneNot the raw almond filling sold under that name today. In this period a creme frangipane is a cooked pastry cream enriched with ground almonds or crushed macaroons, thick enough to spread cold. It goes on the cut layers without further baking.
- Glace au chocolatA poured chocolate glaze, thin enough to flow and set with a shine, not a buttercream. Chocolate loosened with a little sugar syrup or cream and used just warm is one common period approach; sugar-based chocolate icings were also used.
- CuracaoAn orange liqueur made from the dried peel of the laraha citrus. Two tablespoons in a five-white batter is a light flavouring; Grand Marnier or Cointreau substitutes directly.
- Cutting and reassemblingQuarter-inch slices from a 1.5-inch cake means five or six thin layers, filled and stacked back into the original block. Chill the cake before slicing, use a long serrated knife, and keep the layers in order.
- YieldAn 8-inch square, glazed and layered, cuts into about twelve small portions. The folded napkin is a service convention of the era, not a structural necessity.
Naming a cake for a woman, with no further explanation, was standard practice in the French professional kitchens that shaped American hotel cookery around 1900: dishes carried the names of patrons, performers or the chef's own inventions, and the reference was often lost within a generation. The construction here is thoroughly classical, a meringue-lightened sponge split, filled and glazed, and the filling carries one of the oldest names in French pastry. Frangipane is traditionally traced to the Frangipani family of Rome, whose almond-scented glove perfume is said to have given the almond cream its name in sixteenth-century Paris, though the story is repeated more often than it is documented. Curacao points elsewhere entirely, to the dried peel of bitter oranges grown on the Dutch Caribbean island, an ingredient that reached European confectionery through colonial trade and by this date was a stock bottle in any well-equipped pastry room.