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French Yellow Cake

Gâteau Creusois - It doesn’t actually come out yellow. It’s just that a comment made earlier today by our fearless leader AAF prompted me to revisit this lovely regional specialty cake from the part of France where I was lucky enough to live and teach in the 1980s.

La Creuse is a little-known département of France in the Limousin region. The verb “creuser” in French means to dig. And La Creuse is a bit of a hole-in-the-ground.

If you drew a line from Paris to Toulouse, and another from Bordeaux to Dijon, Guéret (the county seat of La Creuse) would lie pretty much on the intersection–in the middle, as it were, of nowhere. I used to joke that I was living in the Ozarks of France, a backwater that is neither here nor there. Neither Northern nor Southern. Neither Atlantic nor yet Alp-ish. (The region was historically called La Marche–the borderlands, the margin.)

Famous for very little, La Creuse produces no great cheeses, no particular wines, not much in the way of cuisine. It lies on the west slope of the Massif Central, a kind of rugged volcanic outpost of the Alps, and so is hilly. It lies in part on the Plateau de Millevaches–which you’d think would mean a thousand cows (and there are a lot of lovely russet-colored Limousin cows grazing round about), but in fact comes from an older Occitan word and means a thousand lakes. Lots of water. Beautiful springs, forest land, hazel thickets, and mushroom hunting like whoa.

So, La Creuse takes understandable pride in the one culinary specialty attributed to it, the Gateau Creusois. Its story is a charming and not-too-cynical tale of dubious history and earnest local PR:

in 1969, when a monastery in the Crocq region was demolished, a 15th century parchment was found there, sheltered from time and careless eyes. Out of the Old French words written there, a delicious recipe arose. The recipe, translated and updated, said, “Cuit en tuile creuse.” [”Baked in a tile-lined earth oven”–see, it’s a pun. Those wacky French.]

In this way, the Creusois cake began its long journey across the world to please the most discriminating palates. Our beloved Creusois cake, ambassador of La Marche, has become the fond friend of gourmands, even though it still keeps some secrets known only to local pâtissiers.

Well, secrets there may be–indeed, when I’ve tried baking this simple cake from recipes I’ve found online, it never tastes quite like what I remember from my days in Guéret–but it’s tasty nonetheless. It’s the sort of cake that goes at least as well with a glass of white wine as with a cup of coffee.

Though the 15th-century provenance of the recipe could be called into question, it does have a simple, timeless, very-European feeling that makes it easy to picture on a medieval table.

Gâteau Creusois

- 5 eggwhites
- 250 grams (1-1/4 cup) caster sugar (baker’s or superfine)
- 120 grams (1 cup) all-purpose flour
- 120 grams (1/2 cup) butter, melted and cooled
- 100 grams (about a quarter pound) hazelnuts, toasted and skinned

Put the sugar, flour, and hazelnuts into the bowl of food processor and process till the hazelnuts are finely ground.

Transfer to a large bowl. Add the melted, cooled butter and mix well.

Beat the eggwhites to stiff peaks, then fold them gently into the flour mixture.

Pour the batter into a well-greased-and-floured 9″ cake pan. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes (a thin blade inserted into the center of the cake should come out dry).

Remove from pan when slightly cooled, and finish cooling on a wire rack. Serve plain, with berries, with a snowfall of powdered sugar, or with a Crème Anglaise made from the five egg yolks you’ve got on hand.

(Note: the original recipe, as presented by the anonymous 15th century French monk, ostensibly went like this, although I have some serious doubts about the availability of either sugar or grams in the 15th century: “Take two cups of good, well-ripened hazelnuts, finely roasted, and crush them with twice that amount of sugar. Into this powder, mix a cup of eggwhites and a handful of flour. Finally, add about a hundred grams of melted butter, beat all together, and cook in a moderate [tile-lined] oven.”)