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Almond Delight
(Hungary.) Blanch, dry, crush, and brown 1/2 pound of Jordan almonds in a little sugar. Add the whites of 6 eggs beaten stiff, and 4 tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar, mix lightly and pour into a cake tin, bake in a quick oven till yellow. When cold, split it with a knife, and fill with whipped cream, sweetened and flavored with wine.
This is a flourless nut torte in the central European manner, closer to a dacquoise than to a butter cake. Two things decide whether it works: the almonds must be ground and cooled before they meet the whites, and the tin must be lined so the fragile round can be lifted out whole.
- Jordan almondsNot the candy-coated sweets sold under that name now. Jordan almonds were large, flat, sweet almonds (the name is usually traced to Old French jardin, "garden," rather than to the river, though the derivation is not certain); any good blanched whole almond does the job. Half a pound is about 1 1/2 cups whole, roughly 2 cups once ground.
- "Crush and brown in a little sugar"The original crushes the almonds first and then browns them; it is easier to toast the blanched almonds whole with a tablespoon or two of sugar until fragrant and pale gold, then grind. The sugar keeps the nuts from turning to paste in a food processor. Cool completely before folding into the whites, or the beaten whites will deflate.
- Oven heatA quick oven in this period is generally reckoned somewhere around 400-450F, fiercer than a nut meringue of this kind wants. Bake nearer 325-350F and take "till yellow" to mean pale gold and dry to the touch, 30-40 minutes for a single 8- or 9-inch layer.
- The tinUse an 8- or 9-inch round tin, buttered and lined with parchment. The batter has no flour and no fat beyond the almonds, so it clings; a springform is easier still.
- Folding"Mix lightly" is the hinge. Fold the ground almonds and the 4 tablespoons of powdered sugar into the stiff whites in three additions with a spatula, stopping while streaks are still faintly visible. Beaten to uniformity, the cake bakes flat and tough.
- Splitting itA cooled nut torte this thin splits badly with a knife. Chill it first and use a long serrated blade with a sawing motion, or bake the batter as two thinner layers and skip the step. Expect some crumbling either way.
- The wine in the creamA sweet wine is meant here: a fortified one such as sherry or Madeira, or a sweet Hungarian Tokaji in keeping with the attribution. Use no more than a tablespoon per cup of cream and add it after the cream has begun to thicken, or the extra liquid will make the cream harder to whip.
- Yield and keepingServes six to eight as written. Fill it no more than an hour or two before serving; the meringue layers draw moisture from the cream and soften quickly.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a genre popular around the turn of the twentieth century: the collection of "foreign" dishes gathered by an English-speaking traveller and labelled by country, here simply "(Hungary.)" Nut tortes of exactly this construction — ground almonds or walnuts bound with beaten whites and sugar, no flour, split and filled with sweetened cream — were and remain a fixture of Hungarian and Austrian confectionery. The technique itself is older than the borders: grinding nuts to stand in for flour was standard in European sugar cookery long before chemical leaveners, and the same idea survives in the Passover baking of central Europe. The recipe is vague about the oven and silent on tin size — a vagueness near-universal in printed recipes of the period, resting on the assumption that a competent cook already knew what a nut torte should look like going in.