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St. Honore Cake
Roll out on a lightly floured table a quarter pound feuilletage to a round piece eight inches in diameter, place on a lightly wetted pastry pan and wet the edges of paste a little. Prepare a pate-a-choux place it in a pastry bag, with a quarter-inch tube at the bottom, press three-quarters of the pate around the wet edges, making a nice border, and set in a moderate oven for twenty minutes. With the balance of the pate make small balls the size of hickory nuts on a small pastry pan and set in oven for fifteen minutes. Place in a copper basin three ounces granulated sugar with a half gill water, boil for eight minutes, then drop in the small balls, one by one, and roll them in the syrup. Arrange one beside another on the border, place half a candied cherry over each ball, then fill up the centre with a St. Honore cream, dress on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A classic French gateau written in professional shorthand: the book assumes you already have puff pastry, choux paste and pastry cream on hand and are only being told how to assemble them. A few of its terms and vessels need translating.
- Feuilletage and pate-a-chouxFeuilletage is puff pastry; a quarter pound is about 115 g, enough for one 8-inch round rolled thin. Pate-a-choux is choux paste, made from water, butter, flour and eggs, and the recipe assumes a batch already mixed.
- St. Honore creamThis is creme Chiboust, pastry cream lightened with meringue while still warm. No substitute is described here, so the cream has to be sourced separately; sweetened whipped cream is the usual modern shortcut but sets much softer.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually read as about 350-375F. Choux rises better started hot, so many bakers now put the base and border in at 400-425F for the first 10 minutes and drop to 350F to dry out; the small puffs bake at the same temperature and need 15-20 minutes.
- Half a gill of waterA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons. Boiled as long as the recipe directs, three ounces of sugar in that little water ends up well past glaze-syrup stage.
- Eight minutes of boilingThat is the hinge. Three ounces of sugar and a quarter cup of water boiled hard for eight minutes can go past hard crack into pale caramel, which is what makes the puffs stick to the border. Watch colour rather than the clock, pull it off the heat the moment it turns straw-gold, and dip the puffs with a fork or tongs, not fingers. Caramel at that stage is around 320F and clings to skin.
- Copper basinUsed because copper conducts evenly and shows the sugar's colour clearly. Any heavy, light-coloured pan works; avoid nonstick, which hides the shade of the caramel.
- Hickory nutsA useful size cue: the piped puffs should be about an inch across, roughly a walnut half or a large hazelnut. Pipe them small enough that a dozen or more will ring the border.
- Assembly and yieldWetting the pastry edge is what anchors the piped choux ring so it does not slide off as it rises. Fill the centre with cream only just before serving, or the puff base softens. An 8-inch cake serves six to eight.
The cake is named for Saint Honoratus of Amiens, the patron saint of bakers and pastry cooks, and is generally traced to a Parisian patisserie on the rue Saint-Honore in the 1840s, with the creation of the cake and of creme Chiboust both traditionally credited to the pastry cook Chiboust. Whatever the truth of that attribution, the structure here is pure nineteenth-century French professional practice: a puff pastry base, a piped choux ring, caramel-dipped profiteroles set around the rim and a lightened pastry cream in the middle, each element a separate exercise from the pastry curriculum. Its appearance in an American international cook book of this period reflects how thoroughly the vocabulary of the French kitchen had been absorbed by hotel and restaurant cooking in the United States, down to serving it on a folded napkin, a documented service convention of the period.