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Small Nougats of Oranges
Roll out on a lightly floured table a half pound of pie paste, to a fifth of an inch in thickness, three inches wide and twelve inches long. Place the paste in a lightly buttered pastry pan; with two fingers raise up all around the edges of the bowl half an inch high. Then spread all over the interior four tablespoons thick orange marmalade. Set in the oven to bake for fifteen minutes. Remove and keep till required. Beat up four egg whites to a stiff froth, add two ounces sugar and three ounces peeled and finely shredded almonds; gently mix with a skimmer. Spread the preparation over the orange marmalade, neatly smooth with a knife and reset in the oven until it has attained a nice golden colour. Remove, cut the cake crosswise into twelve equal pieces and serve when cool.
A shortcrust strip spread with marmalade and finished under an almond meringue, cut into twelve bars. The two bakes want two different oven temperatures, which the original leaves you to work out.
- The hinge: two bakes, two heatsThe crust goes in on its own for fifteen minutes so the pastry sets before the marmalade soaks it, and the meringue return wants a gentler heat until the surface is pale gold, since at full pastry heat whites brown and weep before they dry. The original specifies no temperatures, so any figures are modern guesswork rather than the book's own.
- "A fifth of an inch"About 5 mm. Half a pound of pie paste is more than a 3 x 12 inch strip needs at that thickness, so expect trim, or roll a little thinner and accept a crisper base.
- The pan"Pastry pan" is not defined here; the fact that the edge is pinched up by hand rather than pressed into a tin suggests a flat sheet or shallow pan rather than a fluted tart mould. That hand-raised half-inch edge is the only wall holding the marmalade, so press it firmly and dock the base with a fork to stop it doming.
- SkimmerA flat perforated spoon. It lifts the sugar and almonds through the whites without knocking out much air; a large silicone spatula does the same work.
- The meringue proportionsTwo ounces sugar to four whites is barely 15 g per white, far less than a modern meringue. The mixture will be soft and slack rather than glossy, and it is meant to be. Add the sugar a spoonful at a time once the whites hold a stiff peak.
- Almonds"Peeled" means blanched, skins slipped off; three ounces is about 85 g. Shred them by hand into slivers rather than using ground almonds, which turns the topping to paste.
- Cutting and yieldTwelve bars from a twelve-inch strip, so an inch each. Note the original cuts the cake on removal and serves it cool, rather than cutting it cold; a long thin knife wiped between cuts helps either way, since the meringue shatters and drags the marmalade.
The name is a translation of the French pâtissier's habit of calling almost any almond-and-sugar preparation a nougat, from Occitan nogat, ultimately from Latin nux, nut; here it means the shredded-almond meringue on top, not the chewy confection sold under that name today. Small cakes of this kind, a baked pastry base spread with preserve and returned to the oven under a meringue, ran through professional French and Anglo-American pastry work of the late nineteenth century. Orange marmalade gives it a British inflection.