Friday, March 29th 2024   |

The ‘Jewish’ cake that dethrones the king cake

By JOANNA BRODER

Most locals are familiar with the glittery king cake, which in recent years has become more that a simple cross between a coffee cake and a cinnamon roll sprinkled with colored sugar. Today’s varieties with fruit and cream fillings have taken the simple king cake and transformed it into more than the dessert of choice on Mardi Gras.

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The famous Doberge cake, half chocolate and half lemon as made by Gambino’s Baker in Metairie. (Courtesy of Gambino’s)

What many people outside of New Orleans may not know is that there is another popular dessert that a Jewish woman brought to the New Orleans market about 80 years ago. The Doberge cake stands aloft, bravely standing the test of time in what most everyone concedes is the original foodie city.

Doberge cake is special because it is a New Orleans original, says Judy Walker, food editor at The Times-Picayune. “When you look at it, it doesn’t look like anything else. It’s tall and pretty.”

Beulah Ledner developed Doberge cake in about 1935 by adapting the popular Dobos torte, a cake originating from Austria-Hungary, to make it better suited for the hot, New Orleans climate.

Doberge is a multi-layered butter cake that has somewhere between six and eight layers. Each layer of cake is baked individually. The layers are so thin –not more than 3/8 of an inch—that one needs a special pan to bake them, notes Ledner’s son Albert Ledner, 91.

In between the cakes lies a spread of custard. A thin film of buttercream frosting coats the cake and on top of that is a hard layer of chocolate, lemon, caramel or raspberry icing, Albert Ledner and his daughter Catherine Ledner said.

“It’s a lot of layers,” Catherine Ledner said. “You open that thing and it looked like, you know, a pin stripe shirt on the inside.”

Beulah Ledner was known affectionately as the “Doberge Queen of New Orleans,” according to an article penned by her daughter Maxine Ledner Wolchansky, in 1987. Writing from her home in Atlanta, Wolchansky acknowledged her mother based her Doberge cake on the Dobos torte — a cake made up of thin layers of sponge cake with buttercream between the layers and on the outside of the cake and a layer of hard caramel or chocolate on top.

“… She intuitively knew that it [Dobos torte] was too rich and heavy for the New Orleans’ climate,” Wolchansky of blessed memory, wrote in a self-published cookbook of her mother’s recipes titled “Let’s Bake with Beulah Ledner: A Legendary New Orleans Lady.”

The Dobos torte on which the Doberge cake is based used to be very popular in Jewish communities around the country and especially in New York City in the early twentieth century, said Joan Nathan, Jewish cookbook author. Her most recent book is “Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France”.

She remembers the Dobos torte as a seven-layer, white cake with chocolate buttercream and a layer of caramel or chocolate at the top. What made it so good is the buttercream frosting between the layers, she said.

“I love it,” she said, and fondly remembers eating the cake as a child.

Rose Beranbaum, author of “The Cake Bible”, has her own version of Dobos Torte in her cookbook “The Melting Pot” which she based on her time working in the Hungarian bakery Gundel and which she slightly tweaked so that the butter cream was less grainy.

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The cake eaten by Beulah Ledner’s surviving son, now 91, was close to his mom’s, but still not it. (Albert Ledner)

Beranbaum said that there is something “magical” about skinny, multi-layered cake: “Think of it,” she said. “If you just have two layers, you don’t get as much butter cream. This way, you get almost as much butter cream aSome of the bakeries in New Orleans use a fondant over the thin layer of butter cream frosting.

Beranbaum said fondant is generally used to keep things fresh so that you have time to decorate them. It is not exactly the ingredient of choice when there are options.

“Most people don’t want to eat fondant,” she said, “but of course in New Orleans people have a much bigger sweet tooth and so I can see why they wouldn’t have any objection to it, but that’s not my way of using fondant.”

Some bakeries use poured fudge instead of fondant to coat the cake; Beranbaum said that fudge is also very sweet.

“See my goal is to make things not cloyingly sweet,” she said. “[In the South] they still go for their pralines and sugary things so I think that wouldn’t be the way I would do it, but there’s a market for it, especially in New Orleans.”

While Ledner’s version of the cake used custard instead of buttercream frosting between the layers, she also made butter cake rather than sponge cake.

“This produced a torte with subtle richness and lighter quality,” Wolchansky wrote in her cookbook.

The cake stayed cool because it required refrigeration, especially in the semi-tropical clime of the Big Easy. “She felt like it was great for New Orleans.”

Beulah Ledner created the French-sounding name Doberge (pronounced either Do-bage or Do-berge by New Orleanians), because she thought the name should reflect regional traditions, her daughter wrote.

A love for the cake requires a sweet tooth that even some of Ledner’s descendants don’t possess.

Albert Ledner, well known for his residential and commercial architecture around New Orleans and the country, says he likes it, but it is a bit too sweet and rich for him.

Catherine Ledner, a photographer based in Los Angeles, said that although the cake is supposed to be lighter than dobos torte (pronounced do-bosh), it is still pretty rich. “I’m really not into icing and there’s a lot of icing on that cake,” she said.

Still, not too many people in New Orleans will dispute the popularity of Doberge cake.

“I think the importance of it is self-evident because … 90 percent of bakeries in New Orleans do their own version, “ Albert Ledner said.

No bakery in New Orleans makes the Doberge cake exactly the way his mother made it, Albert Ledner says.  That is because the baking process is so labor-intensive that commercial bakeries today cannot make it the way she did and still recoup their money.  His mother never made much money on Doberge, Albert Ledner said. She did it on the basis of ‘this is the way it should be done.’

Unsurprisingly, bakers in New Orleans tend to think they are the best at making Doberge.

That is not to say that individuals cannot make the cake the right way. Last year, when Albert Ledner turned 90, a neighbor and caterer made a Doberge cake, which he described as “very close and very good.”
Unsurprisingly, bakers in New Orleans tend to think they are the best at making Doberge.

So the pop-up bakery and supplier of desserts to restaurants also uses their own spin on the custard. Theirs is actually a pudding with more updated flavors such a cream cheese, cherry and banana. Traditional flavors for doberge have always been chocolate, lemon and then caramel, Mary said.

Scelfo said a lot of bakeries and grocery stores in New Orleans try to emulate Gambino’s Bakery’s doberge cake but it’s a lost cause.

“They’ll take one layer and slice it and we literally bake each layer individually … because you don’t want your custard to be absorbed within the layer,” he said.

Even though she had sold her recipe to Gambino’s. in 1946, Beulah Ledner opted to go back into the bakery business as a competitor to Gambino’s.

Scelfo recalls having visited Ledner in her bakery, which she opened in Metairie. She was charming, but tough, he recalled: “You did it right or you just didn’t do it.”

Ingredients were hard to come by during World War II and so Albert Ledner said his parents had to close the bakery during the war. Afterwards, Gambino’s approached the couple with an offer to buy the name and the recipe. They decided it was best to sell it, but after a year of idleness, Ledner reopened a new bakery under a new name in what was then the nascent Metairie area.

Jean-Luc Albin, owner of Maurice French Pastries in Metairie, said his bakery follows Beulah Ledner’s original recipe.  The cakes appeal to people who remember them from Beulah Ledner’s time, but also are big on major holidays like Thanksgiving, Father’s Day and birthdays.

Not to miss out on Mardi Gras, he started offering a petifore version of Doberge cake as well.

Albin bought the bakery 26 years ago from Maurice Ravet, who purchased the bakery and Doberge cake recipe directly from Beulah Ledner in the early 1980s, when she retired at age 87 after 50 years in baking and catering.

Everyone knew that Beulah Ledner was Jewish, Catherine Ledner said. She went to synagogue. She was a member of the Jewish Community Center in New Orleans. But her Doberge cake is more of a New Orleans thing than a Jewish thing, she said.

“It’s the birthday cake of New Orleans,” she concluded. “We love to celebrate.”

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