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Delicieuses
(Paris.) Make the recipe for madelienes into very small cakes, bake, then split them. Fill each with cream, whipped and sweetened with cordial or wine, put them together, and dip each in icing, flavored with lemon or strawberry, coffee or pistachio. Serve as dessert, or at five o'clock tea.
This is an assembly recipe: it depends on a madeleine batter given elsewhere in the book, and everything hinges on temperature control at the filling and dipping stage.
- The hinge: chill before dippingWarm cake weeps and warm cream slumps, so the filled sandwiches must be thoroughly cold and firm before they meet the icing. Fill, refrigerate 30 minutes, then dip; return to the refrigerator at once.
- "Madelienes"A variant or misspelling of madeleines. The book's own madeleine recipe is the base here, and whatever batter and moulds it specifies should govern.
- Very small cakesMake them small enough that a split half plus cream is a mouthful or two, in mini muffin or petit-four tins. Follow the book's own madeleine baking directions; small cakes overbake fast, so watch them.
- CordialHere it means a sweet liqueur, not a fruit squash — maraschino, curaçao, kirsch or a sweet sherry or Madeira. Reckon a teaspoon or two per cup of cream, added after the cream has begun to thicken.
- The icingA dipping icing of the period is a poured fondant or a thin confectioners'-sugar glaze, warmed to just pourable, not buttercream. Pistachio and coffee flavourings were made with nut paste and strong coffee essence respectively; strawberry with fruit juice or purée reduced so it does not thin the icing.
- Split, not slicedCut the domes off flat and split horizontally so the two halves sit square. Uneven halves will not hold a cream layer under the weight of icing.
- Yield and keepingYield depends on the book's madeleine recipe and the size of the tins; each finished délicieuse uses two cake halves. Because they are cream-filled they will not keep: serve the day they are made, straight from the refrigerator.
Délicieuses is here a small filled and glazed cake in the petit-four line, and the author's parenthetical "(Paris.)" attaches the dish to that city. The madeleine itself is generally traced to Commercy in Lorraine, where it became a regional specialty sold to travellers, though the several competing origin stories about a cook or servant named Madeleine are traditional rather than documented. The closing phrase is suggestive of date: "five o'clock tea" was an English fashion that Parisians took up, words and all, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and small iced cream-filled cakes suited it.