REPASTS: REGENCY-ERA ROUT CAKES

Rout cakes have faded into obscurity, as podgy and forgettable as Joseph Sedley of "Vanity Fair", writes Jon Fasman ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2009

“Being an invalid, Joseph Sedley contented himself with a bottle of claret besides his Madeira at dinner, and he managed a couple of plates full of strawberries and cream, and 24 little rout-cakes that were lying neglected in a plate near him.” ~ William Thackeray, “Vanity Fair” (1847)

Poor old, weak young Joseph. Enamoured of the nobility and acutely status-conscious, he earns his living as a petty colonial bureaucrat (“the collector of Boggley Wollah”). Returning to London after 30 years of service, he lodges near shabby Fitzroy Square. When Becky Sharp catches his eye, he responds boyishly: first by tricking her into eating a chilli, and then by stammering shyly (“the appearance of a lady”, we hear earlier, “frightened him beyond measure”). He is fond of fine clothes, but fonder still of sleeping, drinking and eating; he manages all those rout cakes even in his weakened condition-something involving blue pills and liver complaints.

Rout cakes were sweet little pastries made for routs-lavish evening parties fashionable with early-Victorian aristocrats and aspirants: in “Emma”, set in the same period, Mrs Elton turns up her nose at a “poor attempt at rout cakes”. They are quite rich, calling for ample quantities of butter and eggs, though they are made of denser shortcrust, rather than flaky or puff pastry.

A rout cake’s flavour comes from currants, brandy, sweet wine and something citrusy or floral, like orange-flower water. One 19th-century cookbook offers a variant based on “almond rout cake paste”-which seems a more pliable sort of marzipan, and is used in some wonderful, only-with-a-houseful-of-servants concoctions, including a recipe that shapes, dries and dyes the paste into carrot shapes, with “a slip of angelica to form the stem”.

The rout cake has many descendants. Chorley cakes are currant-filled shortcrust pastries, with a rather puritan crust (no wine or oranges, no sugar). The Eccles cake also relies on currants, but has a puff-pastry base and a sugared top. Garibaldi biscuits are similar but thinner and longer. But rout cakes themselves have faded into obscurity, as podgy and forgettable as Sedley himself. Perhaps the combination was slightly off: the Eccles cake is better for sweet duties, the austere Chorley for cheese. Or perhaps the tarnish of Regency-era profligacy proved too hard to shake.

Picture Credit: Clifford Harper

(Jon Fasman is an editor for Economist.com and the author of two novels, both published by the Penguin Press: "The Geographer's Library" and "The Unpossessed City".)