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Hobelspane
(German dessert cakes.) Sift 3 ounces of flour, add 2 pinch of salt, the grated rind and juice of a lemon, yolks of 5 eggs, and enough water to make a paste. Let this stand 1/2 hour. Roll it out thin, cut into strips, twist these like curls, and fry in hot fat. Dust them with sugar, and serve hot, with a sauce of melted grape preserves. May be cut in squares instead.
A fried egg-yolk pastry of the Schneeball and Kräppel family, thin enough to blister and curl in the fat. The dough is very rich and very small in quantity, so the two things that decide the result are how thin you roll it and how hot the fat is.
- The flour measureThree ounces is about two-thirds of a cup of all-purpose flour. It is a small batch by modern standards; doubling works, but roll and fry in small lots so the strips do not soften while waiting.
- "Enough water to make a paste"With five yolks and the juice of a whole lemon already in three ounces of flour, you may need no water at all, or a teaspoon at most. Add it drop by drop; the dough should be firm and slightly stiff, closer to pasta dough than batter, or it will not hold a twist in the fat.
- Why it restsThe half-hour stand relaxes the gluten so the dough can be rolled paper-thin without springing back. Wrap it so the surface does not dry and crust.
- RollingThin means thin enough to see the board through. Thick strips fry to a hard biscuit rather than the brittle shaving the name promises. A pasta roller does this quickly.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe says only "hot fat"; in modern terms something in the region of 350-375F suits it. Below that the pastry drinks fat and goes greasy; above it the yolk-rich dough browns before the inside dries. Each twist takes well under a minute per side and should be lifted at pale gold, since it darkens off the heat.
- TwistingCut strips about half an inch wide and four inches long, slit each down the centre and pull one end through, or simply twist twice. The squares mentioned at the end are the plainer version and puff into pillows.
- The sauce"Melted grape preserves" means grape jam or jelly warmed with a spoonful of water until pourable, sieved if you want it smooth. A tart grape, or a squeeze of the lemon left over, keeps it from cloying against the sugar dusting.
- Yield and timingThree ounces of flour makes roughly two dozen small twists, enough for four. They are at their best within minutes of frying and go leathery by the next day; dust with sugar only as they go to the table.
Hobelspäne is German for "wood shavings" or "plane shavings," the curls that come off a carpenter's plane, and the name describes exactly what the fried strips look like. It belongs to a large European family of thin fried festival pastries with equally descriptive names, from Swedish klenäter to Italian cenci ("rags") and Polish chrusty ("brushwood"), all built on a stiff egg-rich dough rolled thin, twisted, fried and buried in sugar. Such pastries were traditionally associated with carnival and other pre-Lenten feasts, when eggs and fat were used up before the fast.