FoodNet

The spirit of cookery

1895

Page 259 · 1 recipe record on this page

Presented as published in 1895. Historical recipes may not meet modern food-safety standards. Cook from the modern interpretation, not the original instructions.
sharp knife. A chocolate custard is suitable for filling them. Mecca calces are made with soft flour-paste or batter con- taining cream, and called ixite viollette ; they ai*e also filled with cream or preserves, and are the cream-tarts of the ‘ Ai’abian Nights ’ tales by which the sister of the exiled Sultan recognised her brother in his incognito of pastrycook. There are choux with cheese; choux with almonds, Medina loaves (nohis) ; choux puffs, or choux soufflSs, flavoured with the zest of oranges; cJmix soufflds in moulds with cedrat; 2)etits choux hedgehogged with sgolit jgistnchios. Of cakes of which nouilles or macaroni, or other dry Italian paste preparations, are leading ingredients, Nouilles Cake d V Allemande is typical. Nouilles paste is said by Dumas to be of German origin ; hence the French name is probably a euphonious (for the French tongue) expression for the German name Nudcln. Translated into English, this might become noodles, but owing to the collateral humorous significance of this word, it became impi’acticable to use it for culinary purposes, and we therefore retain the French derivate nouilles as most widelj'^ applicable. The cake is a thin flat one which is doubled upon itself, or laid over a second one after having been covered with apricot jam. Some garnish the cake with a thin layer of meringue paste, over this shredded pistachios, granite sugar, and small pink and white comfits. All these garnishes are more adapted to the confectioner’s window than the service of the private kitchen. The Nudelkuchen can be classified in a system like ours only by its leading ingredient, for in its execution it is varied so as to become now a gmdding, now a savoury cheese entremets, and again a cake in the principal sense of the word. Analogous cakes may be made with macaroni, vermicelli, semolina, rice, potatoes, sago, tapioca, but they have little specificity. Meringues are classical confections having a good prospect of immortality, as they cannot easily be improved, spoiled. MERINGUES AND HONEY CAKES 41 1 or altered. They have probably a history of more than a thousand years, their name being supposed to be a con- tracted derivate of Merovingians, the family name of the imperial house which was superseded on the throne of Franconia by the Karolingians, thus indicating the time at which they were invented. Meringues can be made of two varieties, according to whether any starch is put into the preparation or not ; incidentally to such addition, the proportions of the main ingredients, white of egg and sugar, have to be altered; the addition of starch assimilates the preparation somewhat to sponge or Savoy cake. The pure meringues of albumin and sugar only are known in France as haisers, or as SgmnisJb foam, and a large confection of the kind is called Sixtnisli tourte ; this latter is a construction in layers of sheets of meringue paste baked, iced, and stratified with whipped cream. Gomgjound Meringues, or Meringue Dtirioles, the latter corrupted into Boyals, are little round cakes of puff paste, the inner basin of which is filled with meringue paste. The large meringue, or Grosse Meringue d la Parisienne, is a pretentious preparation which has no advantage over the common meringue, but, on the contrary, has exchanged the convenience of prearranged subdivision for the necessity of subdividing the product under very inconvenient cir- cumstances for the sole purpose of making iHoney Cake