De Crustulariis

Busy as hornets last week was an organization known as the National Committee for the Birthday Ball for the President. From its headquarters in Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria the committee announced that at least 5,000 U. S. communities would celebrate President Roosevelt's birthday on Jan. 30 and help to raise a permanent endowment fund for his favorite charity, the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation. To Warm Springs went a most impressive birthday present --a vast crate containing a glittering pinnacle of frosted fruit cake, six feet high and weighing 344 Ib. It was the gift of the committee's chairman, Utilitarian Henry Latham Doherty. Designed and baked in the kitchens of his Miami-Biltmore Hotel, the cake is, like the hotel, of steel frame construction. It contains 548 eggs, 75 Ib. of sugar, 50 Ib. of butter, 60 Ib. of flour, 75 Ib. of assorted fruit, 1 quart of vanilla, 3 quarts of rum and rose water. It cost $79 including $15 for labor, and occupied five men for 24 hours.

The art of the Crustularius, the classic pastry cook, is about 300 years old. It became widespread with the price drop that took sugar out of the luxury class in the 1830's. Such culinary guides as Careme's Maitre d'Hotel francaise, and Ranhofer's Epicurean published elaborate engravings and full directions for making Roman helmets of strawberry ice cream and pistachios, spun-sugar rabbits stuffed with puddings or parfaits, wheelbarrows of pastry filled with sugar roses. The tower of pastry with its 52 candles awaiting President Roosevelt last week was not his first crustularian masterpiece. The Roosevelt Inaugural Cake weighed 110 Ib. and was the product of Mme Blanche (Blanche LeRallec), famed cake baker to all U. S. Presidents since the first Roosevelt. A crustularian purist. Mme Blanche disdains such devices as building her mammoth cakes around steel or wooden scaffolding. She has built self-supporting cakes weighing over 600 Ib. which were entirely edible from base to candy Cupid, with the exception of a few concealed electric light wires. She works from blue prints, bakes her cakes in sections, in an old-fashioned coal stove, likes to have two months to execute a large order. A Mme Blanche fruit cake is supposed to last 25 years. Stiil in her "studio"' in Manhattan is the romantic ruin of a ten-year-old cake on which she occasionally likes to nibble. Like the Gothic cathedral builders, Mme Blanche believes in symbolism in her designs. The base of the Inaugural Cake was of lady's cake, a Georgia recipe in honor of President Roosevelt's interest in Warm Springs. Around its rim were miniatures of every President from Washington to Hoover garlanded in gold laurel leaves. The secret of a Mme Blanche cake lies in its seven-step method of icing, of which the five central processes are a sturdy secret of her own.

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