In an exhaustive and exhausting report on Mardi Gras season baking in the Crescent City, the Times food section this week salivated about various contemporary, over-the-top versions of local “classics” known as doberge and king cake. According to the piece, doberge was “invented” during the Great Depression by Beulah Levy Ledner. Ms. Ledner is said to have adapted the dobos torte mentioned but never explained), by substituting custard for butter cream because of the local climate. What’s glided over here is the actual cake Mrs. Ledner was adapting, the multi-layer pastry, which was invented in Hungary in 1887 in the kitchen of Jozsef C. Dobos, a giant of Hungarian cuisine. Why not acknowledge this? One sentence would have sufficed, but the article can barely be bothered with the European pre-history of the gaudy provincial cakes it is celebrating.
The nauseatingly over-elaborated and overdecorated New Orleans king cakes of today are descendants of the French pre-Christian galette des rois. The article drops a cryptic, scornful parenthetical allusion to this tradition: ”(A note for pastry nerds; it is not descended from the buttery northern French galette des rois, but more likely from the colorful southern French gateau des rois).” Oh, really. Where does this contempt for history come from? Why does The Times assume that readers interested in knowing something about the original king cake can be dismissed as nerds? Is food history bunk?
Anyone interested in learning about the galette des rois and its fascinating table ritual should consult the relevant entry in The Oxford Companion to Food by that arch-nerd of food history Alan Davidson. The “colorful” southern version of the cake, the galette des rois provencale, is not a true, flat sober-looking galette but a brioche, gaily decorated indeed, but, at least in the pictures published online, not remotely as garish as the cakes now on sale in New Orleans.
As to dobos torte, an amusing and illustrated account of the cake and of the illustrious Dobos himself can be found in George Lang’s The Cuisine of Hungary.
