Gâteau or Biscuit de Savoie
Majestic mountains light as a feather
The fine arts are five in number, namely: painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and architecture, the principal branch of the latter being pastry. - Marie-Antoine Carême
I have been researching the history of French foods for a number of years, more intensely since I began this Substack a little over a year ago. I can confidently and absolutely state that food history is always a surprise, from the origins of the colorful, healthy ratatouille as a stew of bad quality eaten in low-quality dining establishments, eventually becoming the term for military slop, to the tasty macaron de Cormery being shaped like a friar’s bellybutton or the croquendoule brioche like a donkey’s excrement, to chocolate being drunk to “fertilize the pleasures of marriage” and a chamber pot filled with steaming, fragrant onion soup being offered to newly married couples on their wedding night.
One surprise after another.
But sometimes researching a recipe leads to the unexpected. As it did in my looking back into the origins of the gâteau de Savoie.
The story of this “light as a feather” cake from the mountainous, snowy region of France is actually quite simple, except, of course, for the usual debate over the name of the chef , either Pierre de Yenne or Jean de Belleville, who created it in the kitchens of Amédée VI, Count of Savoie in Chambéry. In either 1348, 1358, or 1365. But that’s neither here nor there. I’ll give the most reasonable and universal account.
Amédée VI, Count of Savoie, Duke of Chablis and Aoste, was paid a visit by Charles IV of Luxembourg in the year 1365. The Emperor conferred the title of vicaire perpétuel et héréditaire de l’Empire dans l’ancien royaume d’Arles - perpetual and hereditary Vicar of the Empire in the former kingdom of Arles - on Amédée who had apparently long yearned for this title because it allowed him to participate in the Crusades in the Orient. Which he did shortly after with much pomp and success. Count Amédée organized a grand banquet to honor Charles IV and asked his maître queux, head chef, to prepare a very special dessert, a cake “as light as a feather”.
To obtain the lightness desired, Chef Pierre attempted what was apparently an innovation: he separated a number of eggs, beating the yolks with sugar for a very long time until they thickened and lightened. He then beat the whites separately until mounded high, light and airy, then folded the whites into the yolk-and-sugar mixture to lighten the batter even more, before blending in flour.
By choosing to bake the cake in wood - some versions claim the cake mold was made of wood and others claim the cake mold was placed on a wooden tray - a material that conducted heat poorly (remember there was no temperature gauge on ovens!) the cake baked slowly and rose gradually, making the cake even lighter.
This clever chef even baked the cake in a special mold shaped to represent the Duchy of Savoy, tall and regal with its high mountain peaks and deep valleys, the whole topped by an imperial crown.
Pierre de Yenne created a dessert unlike any other at the time; cakes of this sort most likely did not even exist. Flans, tarts and tourtes, rissoles (like individual hand pies or turnovers), compotes or cooked fruit, and creams were the sweets commonly found on medieval tables. Cakes themselves were more like breads sweetened with honey and spiced, made sweeter and denser still with the addition of dried fruits and nuts.
But what did I find so unexpected? The invention of the gâteau de Savoie was truly an innovation in the world of French pastry, but what I found fascinating was that it wasn’t originally called a gâteau de Savoie, but rather a biscuit de Savoie.
We understand the French word biscuit to mean cookie, especially one that is baked twice - bis (twice) + cuit (cooked). The 1938 edition of Larousse Gastronomique defines biscuit as a pastry subject to a double baking process, the second baking giving the confection, usually dusted with sugar before being put back in the oven, a crispy outer shell, which also helped keep the interior of the pastry moist and tender. We tend to infer from this description that we are speaking of cookies, like ladyfingers.
But here is where our minds are blown with a brand new definition of the word biscuit.
Alexandre Dumas, novelist, and Denis-Joseph Vuillemot, chef, in their 1873 Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, a formidable work and important reference in the world of cooking, defined biscuits as “delicate, light pastries made with eggs, whose whites must be beaten until wrist-tired, with sugar, flour or potato starch and a few herbs or other substances incorporated into the batter.” Egg whites beaten until you cannot beat anymore…incorporating the most air possible into the whites. And the biscuit de Savoie is the first recipe the 2 gentlemen offer under the heading BISCUITS.
My 1984 edition of Larousse Gastronomique returns to this old definition shared by Dumas and Vuillemot: a biscuit is a pastry lightened by beaten and whipped egg whites or baking powder (as used in the génoise, a much later invention). The Larousse, like Dumas and Vuillemot, give a number of examples of this type of biscuit including the quatre-quarts, the manqué, the génoise, the biscuit roulé (Swiss or jelly roll), and the biscuit de Savoie. “In modern language,” they continue, “biscuit also refers to any product of a biscuiterie,” industrial or artisan, meaning a cookie, a gâteau sec, or “something twice baked although this method of baking is less common today except for le biscuit de Reims or le biscuit à la cuiller” (ladyfingers).
Learning that a cake was not always a cake but a biscuit, and that a biscuit was not always a cookie was one of those unexpected pleasures of my food research. A light-as-a-feather cake made ethereal, delicate, and tender thanks to folding beaten egg whites into yolks beaten with sugar until creamy and thick, seemingly invented by Pierre de Yenne in the kitchens of Amédée VI, Count of Savoie in the 14th century. Enlightening!
And yet…. Over time, the name of biscuit de Savoie was indeed at times a biscuit and at times a gâteau, and at times a cake and at times….cookies. Or even both, using the same recipe but depending on how the batter was shaped to be baked.
François Massialot’s earliest edition of Nouvelle instruction pour les confitures, les liqueurs, les fruits, published in 1692, instructs the baker to “shape the biscuits on paper with a soup or table spoon - la cuillère à bouche - in rounds or ovals and dust them with sugar, blowing off the excess. So, individual cookies, known today as Savoyard. His 1715 edition includes recipes for Biscuits de Savoye and Biscuits de Savoye légers, recommending the biscuits be baked either in buttered tin molds or shaped with a spoon onto paper, either recipe being used to make cakes or cookies. The latter recipe is made lighter - léger - by decreasing the amount of flour.
Massialot includes a Gâteau de Savoye in his 1730 edition of Le Nouveau Cuisinier Royal et Bourgeois, replacing the flour completely with a blend of toasted and finely ground pistachios and almonds, then flavoring the cake with lime zest, baking it in a “casserole ou poupeonière” - a pot or a, well, I have no idea what a poupeonière is or was. Once baked, he covers the cake in a white icing of sugar, egg white, and a bit of lemon juice then decorates with candied lemon peel, returning the iced cake to the oven for just a moment to dry the glaze (making that crispy outer shell by twice baking).
The earliest mention I could find of the biscuit de Savoie was in Nicolas de Bonnefons’ 1661 book Les Délices de la Campagne. He employs a Biscuit de Piedmont batter, bakes the cake, seemingly not in a cake mold at all but on paper, and once removed from the oven and the cake mold, the hot cake is placed on rolling pins (rouleaux) so the cake sinks in the middle taking on the shape of a gutter (afin qu’il soit creux en forme de gouttière) and then dusted with sugar.
In 1758, François Marin includes Gâteaux de Savoye - yes, finally gâteau not biscuit, in his cookbook Les Dons de Comus, possibly referring to it as a cake for the first time. Marin suggests glazing the cake with a mixture of egg white, sugar, and lemon, a classic icing, and adding a colorant to the cake batter, red, blue, green, or yellow. For fun, I guess. He also suggests that if the cake gets old and stale, it can be sliced and fried to create other desserts, used to create entremets, or composed desserts. He uses the Savoye batter to make Jacobines (finely ground pistachios are folded in), and a Bonnet de Turquie (a Savoye batter with finely ground almonds folded in, if desired, and baked in a particular mold shaped like a turban).
It’s no surprise that our old friend, the illustrious Marie-Antoine Carême, nicknamed the king of chefs and the chef of kings, is the chef who changed the basic recipe, most likely improving on the texture, for he seems to be the first to replace some of the flour with potato starch (thanks to M. Antoine Parmentier*). Carême also, as is his style, elaborates on the recipe with flavorings, from ground almonds or orange zest, to bigarade or bitter orange, cedrat or lemon, to ground pralines or vanilla.
In 2 of his monumental works Le Pâtissier Royal Parisien of 1815 and Le Pâtissier National Parisien of 1879, his biscuits de Savoie are made into very large cakes (Gros Biscuits de Savoie using 56 or 60 large eggs, 4 pounds of sugar, the zest of 4 oranges, 28 ounces of potato flour, for example). In fact, they are the opening recipes in his chapter Des Grosses Pièces de Fonds, large base cakes, which he uses as the base for innumerable entremets or large composed desserts, charlottes, for example, whether whole, sliced, or shaped and baked into small, individual small cakes or, yes, cookies.
What’s fascinating with Carême is his instructions, minutely detailed, each expounded upon extensively, often interjected with personal experience or comments. His first recipe, Gros biscuits de Savoie au zeste d’oranges, runs 4 full pages of text and notes. His 2 other biscuits de Savoie recipes add an additional 2 1/2 pages. My favorite thing about this grand chef is how he weaves insulting “other chefs” into his instructions: “Our chef authors recommend in their books to….That doesn’t astonish me coming from them” and he continues to explain why those other “author chefs” are wrong in their proceedings because, of course, his own method is correct, whether it is, in this case, how long to beat egg whites or which type of whisk - one made of wicker branches (too compact) or one made of bleached boxwood branches, as “we others do”, which give lighter whipped whites.
This pastry continues to be popular through the 19th and 20th centuries, pretty much unchanged since the kitchen of Pierre de Yenne, finding itself in a wide variety of cookbooks, books written for professionals or family cooks. Le Cuisinier des Cuisiniers (1000 Recettes De Cordon-Bleu, 22nd edition) by Dr Jourdan-LeCointe in 1844 (biscuit de Savoie); La Véritable Cuisine de Famille par Tante Marie in 1925 (biscuit de Savoie), Henri Babinsky aka Ali-Bab’s highly influential tome Gastronomie Pratique (Études Culinaires) in his 1923 and 1928 editions, also calling it a biscuit de Savoie.
Austin de Croze, in his 1928 Les Plats Régionaux de France, 1400 regional recipes, calls it Le biscuit ou gâteau de Savoie, covering all of his bases and doing away with any doubt. De Croze also suggests a lighter version by decreasing the amount of flour in the recipe, as Massialot did back in 1715, citing Massialot’s Le Cuisinier Royal).
And both the Nouveau Manuel de la Cuisine Bourgeoise et Économique par un Ancien Cordon Bleu published in 1856 and the 1939 cookbook La Cuisine Moderne finally refer to it simply as a gâteau de Savoie.
*Thanks to my friend, Michael Procopio, author of the brilliant Substack Spatchcock, for calling my attention to M. Parmentier, who worked on developing the potato into foodstuffs and using potato starch in baking during the same years that Carême was writing cookbooks.
The gâteau de Savoie is what we would today call a sponge cake or a génoise in France, the main difference being the use of potato starch along with the flour. And no other rising agent than the eggs. Potato starch, a gluten-free extraction of the starch from potatoes - as opposed to potato flour which uses the entire potato to make the powder - adds lightness and crispness in baked goods; the starch granules absorb and hold water during the baking process making a moister and more tender cake, even more so than using cornstarch, moister and slightly denser than a regular sponge cake although extremely light, as well.
Gâteau or Biscuit de Savoie
6 eggs
Pinch salt + 2 or 3 drops lemon juice for the whites
¾ cup + 2 tablespoons (150 grams + 30 grams) granulated white sugar
½ cup + 1 slightly (75 grams) rounded teaspoon white flour
½ cup (75 grams) potato starch
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
Zest of 1 lemon, about 1 teaspoon
Butter (just barely melted) + more potato starch for the cake pan
Notes:
I take the eggs out of the refrigerator 15 - 30 minutes before separating and using.
You need potato starch NOT potato flour.
The pinch of salt and the 2 or 3 drops lemon juice help stabilize the beaten egg whites. Like cream of tartar.
If you don’t have a lot of experience separating eggs and are nervous - you absolutely do NOT want any yolk or shell to slip into the whites which must remain completely clean to whip up well - then have 2 small bowls ready and break and separate your eggs one at a time, dripping the white into one bowl, placing the yolk in the other. Each clean egg yolk and each clean white will then be placed or poured into your larger mixing bowls before separating the next egg.
Preheat the oven to 325°F (160°C). Place the oven rack low enough to give your cake pan and eventually the risen cake the room it needs.
You’ll need a regular 10-inch (25 or 26-cm) diameter Bundt cake pan or similar sized fluted or straight-sided tube pan (I love that my old 1970-something Bundt pan has a non-stick coating, even if it is rubbed in places).
Using a pastry brush, butter the pan evenly all the way up to the top of the sides and the top of the tube with just barely melted butter, making sure the crevices are buttered, too. Dust with potato starch and tap out the excess.
Carefully separate the eggs, putting the yolks in a large mixing bowl of your choice, the whites in a large plastic or metal bowl - I prefer plastic (egg whites slip around glass, leaving a small amount of whites unwhipped). Add a small pinch of salt and just 2 or 3 drops of lemon juice to the whites and set aside.
Using an electric hand or stand mixer - I always use a hand mixer - begin beating the yolks on low then moving to medium or medium-high speed as you add the ¾ cup (150 grams) sugar in a steady stream or in about 3 additions, just so you don’t splatter. Once all the sugar is added, turn the speed up to high and beat the yolks and sugar on high for an additional 4 - 5 minutes until thick, aerated, and pale. Add the vanilla and the lemon zest a minute or so before the end of the 5 minutes of beating.
Set the thick yolks/sugar batter aside and clean and dry your beaters really well.
Begin beating the egg whites on low speed for about 30 seconds then gradually move the speed up to high. Beat the whites until opaque and no longer foamy. Gradually add the 2 tablespoons (30 grams) remaining sugar as you continue to beat on high speed. Continue to beat until the whites have become really stiff, thick, and glossy and when you touch them they feel like thick meringue and peaks remain standing.
Now you’ll fold the whites into the yolk batter in about 4 additions: start with about a quarter of the whites to lighten the batter, then fold in the rest of the whites in 3 more additions; fold in a new addition of whites before you’ve completely blended in the former whites or you risk over-folding the batter and deflating it. *To fold, turn the bowl towards you in quarter turns with your left hand while scooping batter up from the bottom back to front towards you: your spatula and the bowl will be going towards each other.
Once all the whites have been added, you can then fold until you have no more lumps of white remaining. Then immediately stop folding - do not overfold.
Quickly whisk the flour and potato starch together then fold into the batter in 3 or 4 additions, using the same hand/spatula movements to fold in (turn, fold, turn, fold, etc) scooping well up from the bottom to avoid leaving pockets of dry ingredients in the batter. Once the batter is completely blended and smooth, immediately stop folding.
Carefully pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for 45 minutes or until well risen, golden on top and firm when touched. If in doubt, leave in for a couple more minutes.
Remove the cake from the oven and place on a cooling rack just for a few minutes before turning it out of the pan (mine slipped right out). Eat warm (the original biscuit de Savoie was eaten warm) or at room temperature.
Just before serving, sift powdered or icing sugar on top of the cake like a light dusting of snow on the mountaintops.
Yes, as our favorite old cookbook authors wrote, the cake can be flavored in a variety of ways, iced if one likes, or used as part of a more complex dessert. Or serve with chocolate sauce, fruit coulis, or ice cream.
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I incredulously ask again , where do you possibly find the time to research , write, and illustrate such a well written article and run the hotel?
I liked the description of “beaten until wrist-tired”. Loved reading about the history of the Biscuit de Savoie.