We end this little miniseries today, with a luscious cake that relies on a once common, now admittedly hard to find ingredient, that is, ultimately, optional: rose geranium leaves.
You all know geraniums: those big, red, ubiquitous flowers. When I was a kid, they always seemed to show up on the fourth of July, and they were always in windowboxes. Fancy ones too, with names like "Martha Washington." We all focused on the flowers, but never really paid much attention to the leaves.
Sometime, though, if you happen to be able to do so, grab a geranium leaf. Smell it. Then crush it between your fingers, and get that somewhat spicy, green fragrance. It's from a compound called "geraniol," surprise surprise. It's a major player in perfumes, and I believe that it has some insect repellant properties too.
Those are MODERN geraniums. In fact, the family of geraniums is HUGE, and most of them do not have those enormous flowers. Rather, they have very tiny, almost invisible lavender flowers. And big, fragrant leaves, with scents like nutmeg, lemon, citronella, and our subject today, rose.
In Northern California, these older geraniums grow to huge sizes. I have seen enormous, rose geranium BUSHES. Here in the Northeast, as is the case with most plants, we have to be content with the houseplant sized variety, and that's fine with me. I had a rose geranium plant last for me for twenty years before she (I somehow thing of geraniums as females. Don't ask me why) gave up the ghost, and I had to get a new one. I had it because these plants are culinarily useful. A bit of history here, with one of Annalena's trademark digressions.
We always have to remember that much of what we eat today and treat as "common" wasn't always. Sugar, for example, was once the property of only the rich (and Annalena strongly recommends the excellent book, by Norman Mintz, "Sweetness as Power," which is an admittedly Marxist, anthropological/historical study of how sugar went from elitist to cheap commodity). Some other items that we think of as expensive (vanilla beans, extra virgin olive oil), were once so rare, and so prohibitively expensive, that they were used on special occasions or medicinally, if at all. (We will be coming back to vanilla). In contrast, there are other foods that were once registered as "trash food" or "food for the poor" that are now ritzy: oysters. Lobster. Truffles. Saffron. Foie gras. I'm not kidding: all of this was food for the poor. Squab as well. How things change.
Well, let's jump back now to vanilla. It has been known for hundreds of years, and it was costly and rare. It had to be shipped from Madagascar at the time, and on boats. So, if you were, say, a housewife in colonial America, or 19th century America, you waited, and waited. And if the ship sunk, as it often did, you went without. For baking, flavorings other than vanilla were much more common. One was rose water, which we now regard as exotic. Roses, if extracted with hot water, under the right conditions, give you a flavoring agent which admittedly is not everyone's cup of tea. It was much cheaper to make than was vanilla, and it was the standard flavoring in desserts for hundreds of years. Many housewives kept home gardens, and rose geraniums, and other scented geraniums, were grown and used to flavor things.
I do not know why they have fallen out of favor. To my taste, there are certainly similiarities between rose water and rose geranium, but they are NOT interchangeable. For example, rose geranium and blackberries is one of those combinations which I think is a sign that the angels want us to eat well. I would NEVER put rose water into blackberries however. I could go on. In fact I frequently do.
The flavored geraniums have seen a bit of a comeback in Northern California. Sometimes, "Greens" restaurant has a sprig or two of them - with flower- on a dessert plate, and at several restaurants, you will see them in desserts, or taste them as part of desserts but not advertised as such. That is how I learned about blackberries and rose geraniums. I was eating a bowl of blackberries for dessert at "Foreign Cinema," and I tasted what I thought was rose geranium. The pastry chef smiled and told me I had a good tongue.
STOP IT RIGHT THERE ALL OF YOU!!!! Instead of doing that, get to a farmers market or look around, buy yourself a rose geranium plant, or any of the other scnets, and start doing some cooking. Even if you don't care for the flavor, you will have yourself a beautiful plant.
So here's our recipe for today: it's a pound cake. MOST DEFINITELY a pound cake. Dense, not too sweet, in need of something liquid to go with it. I remember learning that "pound cake " was so called because it required a pound each of butter, sugar, flour and eggs. Indeed, I have seen such recipes. Maybe. This one, from "Lindsey Shere's Chez Panisse Desserts," does not have those proportions. It does use both rose geranium leaves, and a spice that you probably don't have: mace. I think that every pound cake recipe I have ever seen, used mace. The only other place I have seen it used, is in Greek butter cookies. You should take a look at mace though, if only to be freaked out: mace is the "cover" of nutmeg. When you see nutmegs that have just been harvested, they have a dark reddish orange web on them. That's the mace. It has notes of nutmeg, but it's decidedly not. If you want a real, standard poundcake, you can make this recipe without the rose geranium leaves, but you can't leave out the mace. Get some, and do some experimenting. Now, let's get to work.
Set your oven to 325, while you collect your ingredients: you need about 18 rose geranium leaves. Also 2.5 sticks of unsalted butter, at room temperature. 1.5 cups of sugar. ABout a teaspoon of vanilla and a teaspoon of rose water (which you can leave out). A TABLESPOON of cognac (which you could also leave out, but please don'). You can combine those three flavorings in one container. Combine together a scant 3 cups of flour and a tablespoon of baking powder (I was surprised to see the Chez Panisse cookbook calling for cake flower, which is NEVER organic, and always bleached. I made the substitution above), and 1/4 teaspoon of mace (you can borrow some from me). Finally, 6 eggs.
Butter the bottom of a 9 inch cake pan. Mix the butter until it's very soft and light, almost white in color (I use my big mixer here, but a small one will do the trick if you have a big enough bowl). Now add the sugar and let it get nice and light again. Now the flavorings, and then teh eggs, one at a time. Sift in the flour, 1/4 at a time, and mix until each addition disappears. There's your batter
Butter the cake pan on the bottom and sides, and then put down the rose geranium leaves. A pattern is nice, but not really necessary. You do want to spread them out, so that the flavor gets in all over the cake.
Pour the batter in, gently, and then get it in the oven for at least an hour. Try the toothpick test. Mine was done after the hour, but you may need anywhere from 15 mintues to a half hour more to get to the point where the toothpick comes out dry.
Let it cool a bit, and unmold it. Don't refrigerate it, and try to keep your paws off of it for a day. Poundcakes always taste better with a bit of aging.
We now move off of the rose petal path . I hope you've enjoyed this little trio of rose desserts. We are going to be moving back to savories in the next couple of days, including a take on summer cauliflower, which I think you will enjoy, and then Annalena's riff on a classic Portuguese dish, done Italian style.
Alla prossima, ragazzi.
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